


Illusion of Being Eternal I thru VI, The

by thebasement_archivist



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-01-15
Updated: 2001-01-15
Packaged: 2018-11-20 12:09:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11335362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: Krycek and Angel each watch the other drown his sorrows in a Los Angeles bar, until they're unable to keep away. Or something like that.





	Illusion of Being Eternal I thru VI, The

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

The Illusion of Being Eternal by S. N. Kastle

TITLE: "The Illusion of Being Eternal"  
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle  
CATEGORY: Krycek/Angel Crossover (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and The X-Files). Hints of Krycek/Mulder and Angel/Buffy.  
RATING: NC-17. This story is dependent upon graphic depictions of sex between men, not to mention some gratuitous profanity. All sex is consensual, but some might consider it "rough." Exercise your internal V-Chip if that bothers you and GO AWAY.  
SUMMARY: Krycek and Angel each watch the other drown his sorrows in a Los Angeles bar, until they're unable to keep away. Or something like that.  
SPOILERS: Third season BtVS. Takes place in the time between events of BtVS's "Graduation Day II" and Angel's "City Of" episodes, and in a slightly alternate, less time-dependent XF universe. Essentially, Angel has moved to Los Angeles but has yet to meet Doyle or learn of his new mission; Krycek and Mulder have had a brief, destructive affair and Krycek has left D.C. for Los Angeles and brooding anonymity.  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. I'm not sure how Chris Carter and Joss Whedon would feel about their beloved doing what they do here, but they have no hand in this particular creation and I'm making no profit off this whimsy save my own content. So there. "The Wall" is a story from Jean-Paul Sartre's *Intimacy*, which I highly recommend.  
ARCHIVE: Basement okay, anywhere else please send URL of archived location.  
THANKS: Whether she knows it or not, this wouldn't have been written without Chris. Thanks also to Hth for an early read and invaluable feedback and to Janet for beta-reading. All mistakes or remaining misinterpretations of character are mine alone.  
WEBSITE:http://home.earthlink.net/~shanak11/fiction.html [archivist's note: If you like behind the scenes stuff, be sure to check out the link to the backstory there!]  
FEEDBACK: Please... It's my inaugural post to this list, but the piece is intended to be just one in a series. If you want to see more you better let me know, or I might lose hope and abandon the project altogether. :) Direct all comments and constructive criticism to .

* * *

"The Illusion of Being Eternal"  
by S.N. Kastle <>

"In the state I was in, if someone had come  
and told me I could go home quietly, that  
they would leave me my life whole, it would  
have left me cold: several hours or several  
years of waiting is all the same when you  
have lost the illusion of being eternal."  
   -- Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Wall"

THE MAN WAS a similar creature.

Krycek had been watching the man for three weeks, three and a half maybe, and that was the only thing he knew for sure. There was something -- he still wasn't sure what -- that they had in common.

That in itself was rare enough that he kept coming back for more. Not every night. There were still commitments to be honored, or at least to be paid lip service. But four out of five nights he sat at the end of the bar, where the curve of the worn wood wrapped around like half a horseshoe, where he could see everyone in the room and still duck out the back door if needed.

He drank two beers, the cheap American kind that made him think of the bitter spit of another man's mouth and football and Mulder, not necessarily in that order. And he watched the man, whom he'd begun to call the Stranger, just to have a way to refer to him. Not that he ever spoke the name out loud. He didn't have many people to talk with these days.

The Stranger was tall, a good two inches or so more than he was, and his body was sinewy and surprisingly supple, bordering on downright beefy around the hips. His dark hair was short in the back and spiky on top, like some preening bird asserting its dominance in a new jungle. His clothes, too, were showy in a way that belied the Stranger's aloof demeanor. He could have been decked out for the new club around the corner if he didn't look so chronically solemn: tight, long-sleeved V-necks and sweaters, always black or gray, with trim black leather pants that were too snug to be missed by many, even in a low-key establishment like this.

It wasn't a bad place to waste away an eternity of regret, Krycek allowed, given all his past sins and the inevitable future payback. It wasn't the most opportune, either, or the most cruisy or the least expensive. It didn't have the greatest decor, but the service was quick and more often than not silent, and self-pity wasn't supposed to be pretty anyway, was it? Krycek had discovered it right after fleeing D.C. for warmer, saner climates, the location a meeting place suggested by a phone sex trick who was neither tall nor dark and nearly got himself killed for the trouble. It had been maybe six months since Krycek had sat with his two beers and a hard, unsmiling face when he returned to find the Stranger, half a year in which the slow, spreading warmth cultivated in the California sun had begun to defrost Krycek's blood. Siberian incubation died hard and the briefest of exposures still sent his temperature plunging.

Didn't seem like the Stranger got much sun, either. Not pale, but no surfer like the WeHo rent boys who strutted down the sandy path outside Krycek's motel, shaking their asses in his direction as he paused to unlock the door. But he never had been tempted by blondes, not for anything more than a good-old Bond girl fuck.

The thing he kept coming back for, the thing he thought they might have in common, even if he didn't have a name for it yet, was this: the Stranger had this *way*. This way of looking at each patron who came through the door, a quick once-over, up-and-down glance, that made Krycek think, at first, that he might be a cop. But it was more innate than that. It was less lieutenant than refugee or prisoner of war. It seemed instinctual, almost predatory. He would never meet the eyes of his marks -- never met Krycek's eyes, that was for sure. Krycek could never get a close enough look to see what color the Stranger's eyes were, or what emotions they held. He wondered, fleetingly, what the Stranger would see in his eyes. Mulder had been the only one to see something human in his eyes in a long time.

Two beers was never enough to forget that.

\----------------------------------------

THE FOURTH NIGHT he went to the bar to watch the Stranger, the man didn't show up. The next day he was back, and in the weeks since he'd missed a day, but never two in a row, in no discernable pattern. Krycek was more patient than most of his employers would give him credit for. He came back night after night and just watched the Stranger, intrigued beyond any reason he could articulate.

He waited for some change in behavior, some clue to understanding how the Stranger could insist on spending each night in a place like this without seeming to enjoy it one iota. Krycek shredded the label on the bottle into a careful pile of wet paper strips, flexed his fingers once and straightened them out again. No matter what the doctors said about state-of-the-art biotechnology, there was just no way to recreate muscle memory. This hand --no matter how perfect the skin tone, how responsive the goosebumps -- did not know what it felt like to touch Mulder's face in a Russian prison, to feel the trembling fear and anticipation. It was all still new then, the touching.

He watched as the Stranger politely refused a half-dozen come-ons, twice as many offered drinks, scores of interested glances. He drank three or four glasses of Scotch neat -- Krycek watched the bartender pull the bottle from the back of the cabinet where it otherwise lay untouched as soon as the man walked in the door. He'd obviously been there for a while in Krycek's absence; he never ordered at the bar, just sat at one of two booths against the wall, whichever was empty, and waited for his drink.

There were five or six other regulars at the bar, and only a couple of them spoke to each other for more than a nod hello. Two bartenders, Amy and Sharon, alternated weeknights and worked the busier weekend together. They were, by Krycek's observation, lovers, and during the week seemed to spend most of the slow evenings on the phone with the other. They said they were glad to see him back, and he took them at their word, and then they left him alone.

A little over month of staring, and Sharon finally caught on.

"You too, huh?" she said, setting down his second.

No one had spoken directly to him since the grocery clerk the day before yesterday; even tonight Sharon had just put his beer in front of him without a word and gone about her business. Sometimes he wondered if he would forget how to answer one day, simply become mute by lack of practice. He stared at her without answering.

"You're more patient than the others." She dried glasses as she spoke; he was alone at the bar just then and the Stranger was the only other customer in the place. He needed a cigarette, patted his jacket pocket a couple times before he remembered that he'd quit, had gotten sick of leaving Mulder alone so he could grab a quick smoke outside in the alley, and that train of thought was going nowhere good fast. Krycek watched Sharon with no small envy -- she got to polish tumblers, a plausible distraction, and he was left without his cigarettes.

Directly, then: "Does he have a name?"

"Not that he's shared," she said, just barely audible under the jukebox, seeming pleased to have won that round. "But he showed up a couple months after you took off the last time and's been coming back since." She paused, waiting for a response. When she didn't get it, she said, "Never leaves with anyone, though."

He thought about that, about whether to ask her another question.

"You just look like a boy up for a challenge, that's all. Like you need a new project." He stayed quiet. Mute.

"Okay, okay," Sharon said, shaking out her dishcloth with a quick snap of the wrist. "I get it. No project necessary." She smiled then. Some people just couldn't fathom the harm others had in their hearts, Krycek thought, watching her move away. For people like Sharon, it was all a joking, friendly world with camaraderie around every corner. He left ten bucks on the counter and walked out into the warm night air.

\----------------------------------------

THE STRANGER WITHOUT a name he'd like to share was sitting at the bar when Krycek came in the next night, two stools down from where he'd planned to sit. Both booths were full -- it was Saturday, Krycek remembered, with the dull recognition of how pathetic a man had become when his days were more or less the same no matter the calendar. The Stranger looked like he'd rather be somewhere else, and Krycek wondered what kept him there.

But then, he wasn't about to turn around and leave himself, so he walked past the Stranger to his usual seat and busied himself with his jacket, empty matchbooks on the bar, a stray cocktail napkin and finally, thank god for Amy, his beer. He was nervous suddenly, though that took him a moment or two to identify. Cops talked about losing their nerve, about not being able to shoot when the time came or even draw their gun. But in his line of work, they talked about losing their *nerves*, about forgetting how to be scared even when it might have been a good idea, might have saved their ass from some fucked-up situation. His nerves came and went, but the visits seemed few and far between and it was always a surprise, like an old coworker who for months you'd sat next to and now couldn't remember his name.

After all this observation, what would he say if given the chance? And if this wasn't a chance, what the hell would one look like? He looked up from the pieces of label he'd been corralling into a pile. Some guy a few seats down from the Stranger had gotten a nosebleed or been punched or something -- he *must* have been nervous if he'd missed a fight or the spillover from one. He glanced at the Stranger from the corner of his eye. He was watching the guy with the nosebleed, and the look on his face was... The word that popped into Krycek's head was *hungry*, like he was a man who hadn't eaten in days, but that didn't make a lot of sense. But that was it, and the Stranger was so preoccupied that Krycek kept staring at him, feeling out different words but none was so right, none fit so well as *hungry*. But what the fuck did that mean?

Then the Stranger shook his head, threw back the remainder of his Scotch in one fluid motion and signaled Amy for another. And then the expression was gone without a trace, and he was looking back at Krycek, catching him in the stare, saying nothing but making it clear that some kind of explanation would be required from Krycek if he hoped to get out alive.

Shit. This wasn't how it should go. He was caught, confused and still processing what he'd seen. But one of the benefits of years of deception was that his mouth knew how to get his ass out of trouble without much help from his brain.

"I'm Alex," he said, missing only a beat. He offered his hand to the Stranger, trying to look as non-threatening as possible. The man paused, seemed to think it over, then reached out and shook his hand.

"Angel."

He must have heard wrong. "Angel?"

The man gave a wry grin. "Yeah," he said. "Angel."

Krycek steeled his nerves, whatever was left of them since he'd apparently launched into auto-pilot pick-up mode. "Can I buy you a drink?"

Angel paused again, nodded. And that was all it took -- he wasn't a stranger for long.

\----------------------------------------

\----------------------------------------

ALEX WAS SO confident it was intimidating. Angel remembered, vaguely, what it felt like to pick up a guy, to flatter him and smile the right way and get him into bed or a back alley or wherever it was that he could eat what he wanted and walk away clean. He knew that was what was going on --the picking up part, at least, though he suspected Alex had some other motive. There was just too little going on in his gray-green eyes; his face was too carefully controlled not to have some vulnerability other than just a come-on.

Amy brought them fresh drinks and he was glad to have something to do with his hands. He still didn't get this part -- this talking to people part that Americans, especially those in this part of the country, were so good at, the Valley dialect rolling off their tongues like it took no effort to say so much, so many words in just a minute, without ever really thinking about what the next one would be.

Even this guy, Alex, who didn't look like he should fit in any more than Angel did, got the talking thing. His black leather jacket was scuffed and worn, not full with any Versace pretensions like the pretty boys around the corner, or at least not in this lifetime. He wore black jeans, like always, tight enough around the ass that it couldn't *not* be some kind of invitation for trouble. In the month or so that Angel had been sitting in his booth, checking him out, he'd somehow left the impression of rough intellect -- tight jeans aside --though he never talked to anyone, certainly not to Angel. His dark hair was cut short and his face was handsome in a been-there, fought-that kind of way: broken nose, a scar beneath his lower lip that made a hint of permanent, false smile, a barely-healed gash on his forehead near the hairline that must have been from a more recent encounter. But he had eyelashes like a Victorian doll, long and dark and impossibly lush, and cheekbones that made his face, despite the obvious beatings, look aristocratic and classically beautiful.

Now, he was making seemingly effortless conversation about the group of men who'd crowded into the bar, six obviously straight, obviously lost guys who still didn't know what was going on. Angel nodded, tried to smile in the right places, didn't seem to be expected to contribute anything, so he didn't. Alex let him get away with short answers to open-ended questions:

"You new to L.A.?"

"Yes."

"Yeah, every time I come back here it's an adjustment again. All those fucking palm trees. Takes a while to grow on you, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"And the people here..." Alex looked over his shoulder at the booths, where the men were finally paying their tab and shuffling off to the door, still loudly wondering where all the ladies were on a Saturday night. "Wanna move over there?" Angel nodded, suddenly even more shy. Not a coincidence any more that they were sitting next to each other, not just politeness that made him let this boy buy him a drink so Angel could stare at his rugged beauty while he made conversation for two.

But he'd known that was coming. Or hoped it, anyway, in some place in the back of his head where, if he was honest, he'd been nurturing a flash to a half-developed fantasy in the past few weeks. Of all the men who'd tried to engage him, bought him drinks, tossed less-than-subtle glances his way that were really invitations... None of them had been remotely interesting. Something about Alex was different, something about his fiercely guarded posture, his obvious moodiness that belied the self-control in which he clearly needed to encase himself. There was something beneath all of that that looked, well, familiar. So he followed him to the booth, not really sure why but unable to refuse the offer.

They'd barely sat down when Amy came over, a triumphant look on her face. "More to drink, boys?"

Angel looked at Alex, who raised his eyebrows and grinned. Angel gave a slight nod of assent.

Alex switched to vodka, which in Angel's view was a debatable improvement on the shitty beer he had been drinking. Alex threw his drink back in one shot, sighed like a man who's tasted mother's milk for the first time in three decades and had forgotten anything could taste so right, so natural.

"So where are you from?" Alex tried, which was basically the same question he'd asked before in a different costume.

Angel tossed back his own drink, let the warmth settle into his throat and chest and stomach and take the edge off his nerves. "Not far from here," he said.

"You didn't learn to drink Scotch like that in Southern California. Where are you from before that?"

"Ireland."

Alex paused. "From Ireland? You don't have an accent." Angel shouldn't have said that, didn't mean to anyway, it just slipped out. The looking-for-fun gaze in Alex's eyes darkened, grew more serious, contemplative.

"It's been a while," he offered in response, not saying anything more, hoping Alex would let it slide the way he'd let him ease his way into the conversation before.

And, just for a second, he did, shook it off and went on: "Yeah, you can't tell I'm Russian at all any more..." He stopped, and his eyes lit up and then darkened almost immediately, becoming more gray and focused and somehow frightening.

Change the subject, Angel thought to himself. Talk about the weather. The palm trees. Anything. But since he'd been returned to Sunnydale, making small-talk had been more than a challenge for him. All those years in a world with suffering no poet could articulate, when senseless, endless servitude was his only reality until he was left feral and infantile and incapable of language -- all that left its own kind of scars. All that remained was that one word, that one name that not even the fires of hell could erase from his memory, and things were never again the same.

He'd relearned how to read philosophy and write sonnets, the vocabulary somehow imbedded in places he hadn't known he still possessed, but simple conversation was just beyond his ken. He'd never gotten past feeling raw and unsure of how to communicate with the people around him, whether they were teen-age girls or the tough men in a place like this. So even when he knew that things were going wrong, when Alex seemed to be on a track he'd prefer to stay away from, even then he couldn't say a damn thing.

"I know what you are," Alex said, in a measured, far-too-deliberately-even tone of voice that could have been from a stranger's mouth.

He *was* a stranger, Angel had to remind himself. He didn't say anything.

"I just..." Alex's loquacious ease evaporated. He looked unsure, then, maybe a little confused.

Angel started to sweat a little, a few drops running between his shoulder blades down the small of his back, he didn't even know why exactly, but he had to restrain himself from bolting right then.

"I've been watching you, trying to figure out what you are. I didn't even think that it could be..." He stopped, looked Angel right in the eyes. "I thought maybe you were a cop."

If only. He found his voice: "I'm not a cop."

"I know," Alex said. And then Angel knew, too, just the second before it came out of Alex's mouth, he knew why he was sweating. "You're a vampire," Alex said calmly.

Calm. That was what he had to be. How the fuck had this gone from a casual drink to this? There just wasn't a good come-back to that one.

"That's it," Alex said. "*That's* the thing I couldn't figure out." It was like he was talking to himself now.

Then he remembered Angel. "Aren't you going to tell me there's no such thing as vampires? That I'm obviously talking out my ass and need another drink or a cab home or something, right?"

But when he didn't answer, Alex laughed, low and short like a cough. "Right," he said. "That's what I thought." Alex's voice was as rough as his skin and jacket and, oh fuck, how had this happened? How had this guy he'd just started talking to made him?

He looked up from the table and Alex met his eyes again. He didn't know what he'd expected to see there -- pity? fear? -- but he didn't find it. Alex was calm, running his finger around the rim of his glass, back and forth, distractedly, patient like a hibernating bear who could sit there for six months until he got a response. Angel didn't know how to get out of this conversation without just walking, and he couldn't do that. Alex may have made him, but he still didn't understand how that could have happened, or what they could have in common for him to still feel connected to the man.

Angel was still nervous, still scared, but he felt aggression at the edge of his fear and grabbed at it, reached for its confidence. "What do you know about vampires?" he finally asked, trying not to sound defensive.

"Plenty." Alex sounded smug now, which genuinely pissed him off, loosened his tongue.

"Read the whole Anne Rice series, huh?"

Alex grinned at that, skating over Angel's anger. "Me?" he asked. "Nah. Saw the movie, though. Not really my type." He looked at Angel, an up-and-down nakedly sexy look. "Tom Cruise is too short. And he had *horrible* hair."

Alex's look burned through his clothes like rays of light. When it became clear Angel wouldn't take the bait Alex was offering -- abandon the conversation for another drink and innuendo -- he answered more fully. "It used to be my job," he said after a while.

Angel wasn't sure what to make of that. This man wasn't a Watcher, that much he knew.

"I used to study them." He looked up. "Your kind. When I was at the FBI."

"You work for the government?" Angel couldn't keep the skepticism out of his voice. Alex was no more a G-man than a member of the Council.

"No," he said. "Not any more. But for a while, I did." Alex seemed reluctant to talk about this, almost pained. "The..." He paused, seeming to choose a word and then discard it, what word Angel didn't know. "The unit I worked with, that was what we did. Study vampires and ghosts and anything that didn't fit the FBI's ideas of how a crime could be committed." Angel didn't know what look he had on his face but it made Alex smile. "Really," he said, answering Angel's unspoken disbelief.

So he knew something about vampires. It didn't make him understand, not really, didn't make him get the world Angel was consigned to. Didn't make this so it could go anywhere. He was angry, then, at wasting time with some groupie, angry at himself for thinking this conversation would lead to some inevitably satisfying conclusion. "So you know all about the underworld now," he said, slipping back into his jacket.

Alex looked at him sharply, stopping him in his tracks, then said quietly, "Shit, that's not the underworld." He leaned closer, and his voice was dead serious: "Vampires, demons -- none of that compares to the shit I've seen humans do."

Angel looked at him, looked the truth he'd been avoiding square in the eye, and said, "You're human."

Alex, for some reason, found that incredibly funny. He laughed, hard and deep from his belly, letting his head roll back. At Angel's quizzical glare, Alex wiped his eyes and leaned back in.

"Technically, yes," he said, still smiling. "Though it's not something I've been accused of in a while."

He didn't want to deal with this... maniac, no matter what they might have in common. "I think I've had enough company for one night," Angel said, sliding out of the booth.

Alex grabbed his arm, his fingers digging insistently through the shirt and into the skin. "Wait," he said. "Angel, don't go. I didn't mean to... Look, I'm sorry if I crossed some line, okay?" He seemed sincere. And that was the strange thing: After all of this, after this whole fucked up conversation he hoped to hell was just a bad dream... Alex still seemed sincerely interested in him.

"I just... I don't care," Alex said, sounding resigned, not quite pleading with him to stay any more. "It doesn't make a difference to me."

Angel sat back down. "It should," he said, wearily. He got so sick, sometimes, of trying to make them get it, get that they should just stay away, that it would all be easier in the long run and no one would have to leave town just to keep everyone's world from turning inside out again.

"Why?" Alex asked, impertinently. "Because you're some creature of the night?" Alex took his hand, pressed his thumb gently into Angel's hand until he raised his gaze from the table. "You don't scare me," he said.

"I should."

Alex didn't let go. "Look, Angel," he said, putting more pressure on his palm until Angel really did look at him, meet his eye. "What I do, the world I travel in -- the worst of the vampires I ever saw was Snoopy compared to what men in my line of work do without losing a night's sleep." He paused. "What I can do," he said, looking away from Angel. "What I've done."

He considered that. "What *do* you do?"

Alex didn't answer.

"Fine," Angel snapped, pulling his hand back. "You know what? Not in the mood for show-and-tell right now anyway."

"Wait," Alex said, slowly this time, weighing different words before he spoke them. "I'm... I sell things."

He didn't know why he was still there. "What things?" he asked through clenched teeth, feeling manipulated.

"Not things," Alex reconsidered. "Information."

Angel loosened his jaw. He was telling the truth, or seemed to be. "What kind of information?" This was like pulling teeth. No Mr. Talkative now.

"The kind men -- governments -- kill for."

Shit, Angel thought. "You're a spy."

Alex looked at him like he was a child that just couldn't get the math right, couldn't realize that people like him didn't have job titles. "It's just what I do, Angel," he said, and hearing his name still spoken gently almost undid him right then and there. "It's what my father did," Alex continued. "It's the only thing I was ever prepared for. It's the only thing I'm any good at."

Angel was quiet. He could accept that, or he could leave. There weren't really any other choices. If that counted as a choice. If he pretended he hadn't made the choice a long time ago, when he'd left Sunnydale and swore he'd never go back, never look back, try to make it through the numbingly lonely days and nights without even fond memories to keep him warm. He didn't deserve warm memories, so he'd wound up at this bar alone. And that was a choice of sorts. "So why are you here?" he finally asked.

Alex seemed to sense that he'd made a decision. "Where?" he asked, confused but with a lighter tone. "Here with you?"

"In L.A."

"I'm..." He grinned. "Would you believe I'm on vacation?"

Angel felt a smile on his face before he could catch it. "No."

"Between jobs?"

He shook his head, determined not to laugh, not to give in so quickly or at least not so obviously.

"It doesn't have anything to do with you, or demons, or any of that," Alex said.

He had to be sure: "You're not gunning for eternal life here?"

Alex shook his head in bemusement. "Are you kidding?" he asked. "I'm an old man already. My father... He died when he was 39. I was 12. None of the boys I knew then are still alive. I don't even want..." He stumbled with the words, and Angel could sense they were somehow more true than the others he had given up. "I've wreaked more than enough havoc for one lifetime in the past five years. I don't want any more."

That was it, Angel realized. That was what they had in common. "You have regrets," Angel said, not a question. "I could see that in you."

Alex didn't say anything for maybe a minute. He started to speak twice, then stopped, as if the words couldn't make it past the barriers of his lips. Finally, he said simply, "You don't?"

"That's all I have," Angel said. "That's all that's left."

Alex's eyes lightened again, like a chameleon. "Then why are you talking to me?" he asked, with a dare in his voice.

Angel didn't know what he was getting at, kept silent.

"Why are you getting me drunk?" Alex asked.

"I'm not..." Angel didn't think that was fair. "Look," he said, "if you can't handle that Icelandic shit, don't blame it on me."

"Russian," Alex corrected him, with a defiant, wild grin. "And sometimes, people like us -- we'll do anything to feel alive, you know," he said. Angel felt a hand on his knee, under the table, felt Alex's fingers move up his thigh, felt himself get hard so fast that he almost bucked up out of the booth. "We'll do it just to break through the numb realization that we've ruined everything good we ever had," Alex continued, his voice velvety and enchanting as a hand cupped Angel's cock through his leather pants.

He moaned under his breath, closed his eyes for a second, letting go of all the thoughts that couldn't take root in a mind so riddled with desire, all the questions that poured through the little holes left in his reason by Alex's deft touch. When he opened his eyes again, Alex had his head tilted toward the back door propped open at the other end of the bar, gesturing at the alley that lay beyond. Alex was whispering: "We'll do it just to feel... anything."

\----------------------------------------

KRYCEK'S HEAD COLLIDED with the brick wall as Angel's mouth slammed into his, the taller man's tongue pushing into his mouth insistently, desperately. Even though he'd made the first move -- all the moves, basically -- Krycek kept trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, how they'd gotten from spilling secrets over one lousy drink to this, but the more Angel ran kisses down his cheek and circled his hands around Krycek's ass the less he cared, anyway, and oh god the frantic heat of Angel's dick was pressed up against his stomach and nothing else really mattered anymore.

Angel twisted Krycek's shoulders around and unbuttoned his fly with one smooth turn of the wrist, pulling Krycek's hands above his head to rest on the wall for leverage. Krycek heard a half-second of zipper descending followed by the briefest of rustling fabric -- a sound that echoed in his head on lonely nights, that would nearly make him come without touching himself -- and braced his knees, steadying his weight.

Angel's cock thrust inside him just as his mouth landed on the back of his neck, all of it together dry and rough and painful and so good. He moved slowly after that first entrance, balancing himself with one hand clenched around Krycek's outstretched arms, one around his rib cage, then quickening the motions once he'd found the right rhythm. Angel's lips drank from him like a dying man, like he would find manna and honey in the sweat trickling from the base of his head, like the world's salvation lay in the tender nook between his earlobe and jawbone and the expanse from chin to jugular. Krycek groaned, reached down and grabbed Angel by the hair with his fingers and let him suck the soft skin in between his teeth until he almost came just from the sharp-sweet pain. He nudged Angel's arm around his chest down toward his own aching dick, pushing his ass back onto each thrust of the man's hips.

The strong hand of the Stranger -- he was almost past the point of remembering names for people or body parts -- wrapped around him, matching his own lunges with even strokes until Krycek cried out and came, slumping against the wall, the other man climaxing just a moment later. They stayed like that for a few minutes, chests heaving and coherent thought or sentences a distant mirage.

Then Angel pulled out, pushed away and zipped up with a tense approximation of his earlier grace. He stepped back a few paces, not saying a word.

Krycek closed his eyes, opened them again, his back still to the man. "What?" he said, half under his breath. Angel didn't answer. Krycek slowly leaned down to grab his jeans, pulled them up as he turned around. Angel was standing in a circle of harsh fluorescent light, staring at him coldly. "What's going on?"

"You said you didn't want to," Angel said, his voice low like a growl.

Krycek didn't know what the fuck was going on now. "Didn't want to? I don't think anybody made you do that, Angel, and I certainly never said I didn't want to."

Angel grimaced, like he regretted it. "Not that," he said, with disgust in his voice. Krycek had no idea what he was talking about. Jesus, 15 minutes ago they'd been sitting inside talking about --

"What is this about?" he asked cautiously.

"You said you didn't want to get bit." Angel spit out the words.

That's what this was about? "I don't," he sputtered. He tried it again, more calmly, "I told you, I don't."

"But you..." Angel paused, seeming almost embarrassed to have to say it out loud, but too pissed off to stop his accusations now. "When I kissed your neck..." He didn't seem capable of finishing the sentence.

Krycek almost grinned in relief: *That* was all it was. "Angel," he started, but the man's face was hard and guarded. "Look, that doesn't mean that I want to..."

He couldn't figure out where this was coming from. Angel's face was so closed off, even the hint of light that had become visible in his eyes as they sat in the booth was long gone. He was a stranger again. Jesus. And if Krycek were honest with himself, that was all he'd ever been, fucking or talk about vampires notwithstanding.

"I'll tell you what it's supposed to mean," he finally said, sick of talking to himself. Fuck him. Fuck his secrets and his regret and his soulful eyes. "It means I like danger."

Angel said nothing.

"And you know what?" Krycek continued. "I'm not the only one. I don't want to get bit, you asshole. But that doesn't mean that the idea that I might -- that it might not all be within my control -- isn't a turn-on."

Angel was still silent, face blank. *This* shit Krycek did not need in his life. Sex with strangers, if that's all this had been, was supposed to be vacant of this baggage, and he already had the ghost of one crazy man to contend with. He didn't need another. "Fuck you, Angel," he said, warming to the anger in his stomach, to the adrenal rush of a good fight. "*Fuck you.* You just fucked some guy you've known less than an hour in an alley behind a fucking fag bar. A guy who figured out your biggest secret in less than that much time. You think I'm the only one here who likes dangerous sex? Don't tell me it would have felt the same at the fucking Holiday Inn."

Still nothing. No response. Just like stone. Fuck him. Krycek buttoned his fly, walked right up to Angel and looked at him one more time, dead in the eyes, a challenge to say something, yell, fight, punch, bite, what-fucking-ever. Nothing. Not a flicker of life or recognition or anything at all. Krycek turned around and walked down the alley, toward his flea-bag motel, toward the nothing he'd had when he walked into the bar that night. Fuck him.

\----------------------------------------

END.

There's more where that came from. Please send all feedback to: 

 

* * *

 

TITLE: "Something's So Wrong With This Heat"  
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle

CATEGORY: Krycek/Angel Crossover (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and The X-Files). References to Angel/Buffy and Angel/Spike/Dru.  
RATING: NC-17. This story refers to sex between men and contains gratuitous profanity and excessive brooding. Exercise your internal V-Chip if that bothers you and GO AWAY. But if that's so upsetting, why are you watching these shows in the first place?  
SUMMARY: Sequel to "The Illusion of Being Eternal" (available from me via e-mail or at the Basement archive). Angel gives himself a hard time for seeking temporary pleasure but then chases after it (and Krycek) again.  
SPOILERS: Third season BtVS. Still set between the events of BtVS's "Graduation Day II" and Angel's "City Of" episodes, and in a slightly alternate, less time-dependent XF universe. I strongly recommend reading the first installment before taking on this one. XF fans should hang in there -- the next part has a big M/K chunk as payback, I promise.  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. The title is from George Michael's "You Know That I Want To," which is quite possibly the most slashy song I've ever heard. It's on his *Spinning the Wheel EP* (Virgin, 1996).  
ARCHIVE: Basement okay, anywhere else please send URL of archived location.  
THANKS: Again, to Chris, who always puts up with my "little theories" about Angel and Krycek even though she has no idea what I do with them when she's not looking, and to Janet and Gab for beta.  
FEEDBACK: Please... Direct all comments and constructive criticism to . Thanks to everyone who had such helpful things to say about the last installment.

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"Something's So Wrong With This Heat"  
by S.N. Kastle <>

      "Lover, don't love too much.  
      I'm a bad boy, I'm a sad boy,  
      and I'll never give you much.  
      Hey, everybody's got some moment in their life  
      they can't change.  
      So I do not dare to take you home.  
      All that I know is that  
      something's so wrong with this heat.  
      Why do you touch the flame?  
      You know you feel the pain, my dear,  
      you always find it here.  
      But you say,  
      I can't stop, but you know that I want to.  
      I can't stop, don't you know that I want you?  
      I want you, baby, more than ever."  
             -- George Michael

ANGEL COULDN'T HEAR anything but the click of his boot heels on the pock-marked alley concrete. The roar of passion in his ears had departed so quickly -- one minute he'd been fucking Alex like it was the only thing in the world he was any good at, like if he tried hard enough it could be the one thing in his miserable existence he'd gotten absolutely, perfectly right. The next thing he knew, he was accepting Alex's wounded vitriol like a salve and watching him walk away, the rivulets of sweat running down his back the only evidence of sex-induced exertion.

What the hell was he thinking to do something like that? He turned from the alley onto Santa Monica Boulevard and walked a good two miles before he calmed down a bit, lengthened his stride and slowed down. Allowed himself to consider his obvious temporary insanity. The man was good-looking, sure. Maybe a shade short of beautiful, even. And he'd touched a nerve with Angel, something about regret and loss that seemed familiar. But then he'd just been touching him, period, groping him beneath the table, and how they got from there to the alley to fucking like men who hadn't felt another's skin in decades was still beyond Angel's understanding.

It had just been so damned long since anyone handled him like that. Even with Buffy... It had just been different. She was so much smaller, and before he'd been able to process the shape of her skin he'd been lost in rage and cruelty again and making love had been like a far-away memory, like a dream. And, anyway, none of that was in the same language as what he'd just done with Alex. *That* he hadn't done in decades. Not even after he changed, when he'd gone back to Spike and Dru, when everything was a strange deja vu to the life they'd lived together in Budapest all those years before. It was never the same. Being with Buffy had just been an extension of all the love he had in his heart for her, and he'd never felt anything as good, as pure... Well, that was the point, wasn't it. That was why everything had gone to hell.

Maybe it was a good thing that it was so different. Maybe that meant it wasn't a risk, or not that kind of risk. Alex's hands had left a trail like sunlight, burning him in a way that made him feel fresh and raw. It reduced the entire consciousness of his existence to interlocking body parts and the search for the best angle, the shift of the hips that would make everything feel even better than it already did.

Despite his anger, his shame at acting so blindly, just the memory of being inside Alex made him throb again, brought a flushed warmth to his face. He had to think about something else. Anything else. He was almost at the Underground, which was sure to be ripe with vamps at this time of night. Maybe he should go by and kick a little demon butt, as she would say. Get it out of his system. Get *him* out of his system. Get himself back to a place where the bad guys didn't pulse in his veins and fighting the good fight was what was important.

\----------------------------------------

THE UNDERGROUND WAS a dive even for a back-lot vamp hideaway. The demons were mostly losers, mediocre killers at best who probably didn't even appreciate the carefully ironic name of their favorite hanging place. They were men who'd had little to offer the world their first time around and weren't doing any better now. Given the ultimate opportunity for rebirth, the embodiment of possibility, the chance of becoming the New Man, most had opted for furthering their careers as drunks and layabouts.

Even Angel, despite never having been much of a contribution to society as a human, had come into his own as a vampire. He'd quickly learned how to fight, how to lead, how to be cruel with a relish that might have surprised someone who still had a soul. He'd taken to it with more enthusiasm and skill than had ever before blessed his juvenile demeanor. And when he slowed down long enough to let himself remember, it was that ingenuity that left the deepest scar -- how do you atone for something that was so completely enjoyed?

But these men... They were content with hand-to-bite subsistence, making enough trouble to keep themselves fed but never aspiring to the kind of Armageddon that had always fascinated Angel. It was sort of pathetic, actually.

Angel waited by the door for the first guy to stagger out, then followed him a few blocks. But the guy wasn't going after anyone, wasn't looking for much beyond a place to take a piss, and all the anger Angel had felt at Alex as he had stood there before him, challenge clear in his eyes --

All off that came back in a whir and then he had the creep shoved up against the wall, and his fingers were clenching at the guy's throat. He was pulling the stake out of his pocket when the asshole spit in his face.

"What the fuck is your deal, man?" The guy was two parts indignant, one whiny, and Angel pulled up his hand to finish it, wood grasped between his fingers.

"Wait," the vamp pleaded. "You don't even know who I am."

"I know what you are," Angel said.

"Takes one, huh?"

"Excuse me?"

"Get your fucking demon mitts off me, man."

"Give me one good reason."

"You don't know if I'm a bad witch or a good witch."

"And spitting in my face is supposed to help me tell the difference?"

"I didn't even do anything." Now it was pleading mixed with whining, not any more attractive than before.

Angel considered the man's point. "Not tonight, maybe. Not yet." The vamp didn't argue with that, looked away.

"I'll take you to a lair, man," he offered quickly, begged really. "If that's the kind of thing you're looking for. You don't even have to pay me."

"That's good. Seeing how I was planning on killing you, anyway, it's nice of you not to charge for useless information."

"Just let me go. Please, man. There'll be 10 or 15 vampires there by sunrise. I'll take you there and you can do whatever you want."

Angel looked into his eyes, gauged the degree of terror in the man's look to be genuine, and loosened his grip. "It's not even three. I'm not letting you out of my sight until then, you realize." The creep nodded. "Fine. I have to get supplies." Angel took his hand off the guy's shoulder and nudged him in the right direction. "Stay right by my side, or I swear I'll dust you where you stand, information or not."

"Fine, fine. So what's the dark avenger's name?"

"Excuse me?"

"What do I call you?"

He really did not have time for this shit. "Generous to a fault."

The guy laughed softly under his breath. "That's good," he said. "Should we make it Genny for short? I'm David, Genny. Nice to meet you, Genny. Come here often, Genny --"

"It's Angel," he said tersely, cutting him off. He pulled the guy's arm to veer around a corner, then down the back stairs to his apartment, checking once or twice to make sure no one followed.

\----------------------------------------

DAVID WAS WALKING around Angel's basement apartment, gazing over the weapons hung on the wall, appraising the bookshelf, generally looking like he was a guest over for tea and not a prisoner killing time until he could sell out a few friends for a quick escape. He actually didn't look like as much of a scum-bag as he undoubtedly was, Angel had to admit. Nothing extraordinary, but he had light brown hair just long enough to get caught in his eyelashes from time to time, slightly above-average good looks and a quirky, expressive mouth that showed off a strikingly perfect smile. And someone said too much iron was bad for the teeth.

Angel *was* making tea, predictably. It was such a Giles thing to do, but he just wasn't in the mood to make stupid conversation with this asshole for the next three hours. Even with the tea there would be more than enough time to grill him about the location, figure out which tunnel would be best for a little subterraneous sunshine-free early-morning commute, pack up the stakes and swords.

He watched David walk into the bedroom and check not-so-casually to make sure Angel was watching before he sat briefly on the burgundy velvet comforter. Jesus, did he have a sign on him tonight or something? Will screw the wrong man for shitty reasons if given half a chance?

No. That would not solve anything, even if it would make the time pass more quickly. This was all too close to the way he used to spend his days in Europe: quick kills, long fucks, little thought given to consequence or relevance, if there were any to be had. Something in Alex had set him off down this path again, and he just had to turn around before he got in over his head. Before it was all too late again.

David was back at the bookshelf again, engrossed in a series of volumes about 16th century English anarchists. When Angel set the tea in front of him and settled down onto the couch, he almost laughed at the seeming domesticity of the whole situation. Almost.

And then David turned to him with fresh recognition in his eyes and said, "You're Angelus, aren't you? 'Angel' for Angelus."

Fucking Christ. He really did have a sign on him or something. But it wasn't "will fuck for distraction," it was "Hi, I'm a vampire. Ask me how!" He didn't respond, wondered if his whole night was about to, against his better judgment, repeat itself.

"That's why your name sounded so familiar."

Angel sighed. Again. "Do I know you or something?"

David looked a little sheepish. "No," he said. "But I know who you are."

"My good name precedes me, huh?"

David laughed a little again, showing those white teeth for just a moment. "Not really. I know Spike."

"That's not exactly a character reference in my book."

"Yeah, you must have broke his heart but good for him to still hate your guts so much." David looked up, the come-hither glance clear but not aggressive. "Spike was my sire," he added, maybe counting on a little confession to even the score. "And you were Dru's, and she was Spike's, if I remember all the family history correctly. And then you got cursed and turned into a... I think Spike used to call you a 'toothless wonder.'"

"On his nice days, I'm sure." Just because Angel was indirectly responsible for this prick didn't mean he was, well, responsible for him. It didn't mean he couldn't kill him right now and forget about the vamp hideout and just go to sleep and pretend this whole goddamned night had never happened.

Angel thought about that one, turned the idea round and round in his mind. What difference did it make, anyway, if he killed David or the other vampires? If he kept his word, let David go, the guy would just keep on killing people. It's not like he really deserved to live. He would have been dead a long time ago if Angel had never met Spike in the first place, right?

David was shifting to sit on the couch next to Angel, sliding his hand down Angel's thigh in a poor imitation of the smooth move Alex had made a few hours before, eliciting none of the same fire in his veins. That snapped him out of it, and he stood and strode back into the bedroom. He reached into the closet for a bag to haul weapons in and turned around to find David pulling off his shirt, obviously having mistaken the sudden exit for a romantic interlude.

Angel shook his head curtly. "Put your clothes back on," he said. "Tell me about this lair."

\----------------------------------------

DAVID HAD DECIDED to help, showing all the signs of an education at the hands of Spike: If they're not your own gang, they're not worth saving. So while Angel brought judgment day a little earlier than expected to the heavy-eyed vamps, David staked and beheaded his way down the other side of the room.

But then it went bad, and quickly. The head vamp finally showed up with another dozen cronies, and before Angel could warn David, his new fighting partner had a splintery pacemaker and was nothing but ash. Angel killed two more and disappeared down into the sewers. He doubled back over his tracks twice to make sure he hadn't been followed -- all was okay on that front, but the surviving vamps had already cleared out.

This was why he didn't get involved. He should have sent David away as soon as he knew the address wasn't a set-up. He should have left the bar as soon as Alex made him for a vamp. He should have moved to Los Angeles as soon as he got his strength back instead of following Buffy around like a stupid dog, wrecking what was left of her chances for a normal teenage life. He should have a found another sunrise to finish things off, snow be damned.

It wasn't too late for that, he allowed, except he felt he'd made some unspoken compact before fleeing Sunnydale. That he'd leave her life alone and in return stop looking for ways to end his own, undead as it was. She never would have let him go otherwise, he knew. Would have followed him, given up the things she needed to be doing, just to make sure he didn't put his lousy excuse for an existence to the existential test.

Fine. He'd just go home, try to eke out a few hours of sleep, wake up, start the whole damn thing over. Help someone escape evil, kill the evil, feel sorry for self, lather, rinse and repeat. He really didn't deserve much more.

\----------------------------------------

ANGEL WAITED EIGHT days before going back to the bar. It wasn't a magic number, just the way things worked out, and anyway there was only so much self-pity even he could handle without going mad. But the first three days he'd been out late cleaning up other people's messes, the fourth was blood bank day, five and six he'd been in Venice Beach tracking down a hit man and seven turned out to be his Sabbath, a day off and a welcome night with some medieval history to relax. On the eighth night, his upstairs neighbor returned to the drum set with a vengeance and Angel fled to quieter -- or at least more familiar --territory.

But Alex wasn't there. Angel was disappointed, even though he'd coached himself on the way to the bar to expect nothing less. He'd fucked the man, all but spit the taste of him back in his face and let him walk away without a word. Angel wouldn't have come back for more, either.

Well, probably not. He didn't even know what he'd say if Alex showed up, how he would explain the way he'd acted or that, no matter how many times he told himself it was an idiotic, dangerous thing to want, he'd do it again given half a chance. All week, beneath the busyness of his routine, he couldn't stop thinking about the way Alex moaned when he licked his neck, the way his shoulder muscles had rippled beneath the jacket as he pressed back against Angel's thrusts. He wanted the man naked, sprawled out on some bed with his short, spiky tousled hair making porcupine quilled shadows on a wrinkled pillowcase. He wanted him, period, blank verse or not, sensible or not.

There was something unhinging in those crazy moments they'd had together, something that made the importance of everything else fade like the memory of faces from a different century. That was probably the last time he'd felt anything close to this, those days right after he met Spike in a West End bookshop, when no matter what he did he couldn't escape the fervent heat of his own desire.

Angel had always thought it poetic justice that Spike had first chatted him up by asking if he'd read the newest anarchy tract. There had never been any rules that kept them together, no sense of order in the life they'd built with Dru. There was nothing but the sheer destructive energy they were usually able to keep focused on some external force instead of each other. Usually.

Even when he was still William, Spike's fierce philosophies had seemed energizing to Angel. He'd shown an appreciation for the music of death and mayhem that was seductive in its intensity. Angel had half fallen in love with him in their first 15 minutes of conversation, known somehow that this man stood out from the haze of killing and siring that had made up the 100 years prior. As soon as she met him, Dru knew it, too, and didn't wait for Angel to make the invitation before taking things into her own hands. Those months just after Spike rose, as Angel taught him the ways of their world, there had been a crackling, lightning-filled sky of passion between the two men. Having Dru in the mix only made the balance more intoxicating and -- demon souls notwithstanding -- they learned to place loyalty above all other traits, learned that the commitment they felt toward each other was what would keep them dominant, let them run things the way they wanted instead of following someone else's plans.

None of that was the same after he was cursed, or when he changed back again. Spike and Dru had spent too long taking care of each other; Angel had forgotten what a chore it was to balance three egos and come out with your own still intact. All of them seemed to find more wicked delight in playing one off against the other than in coming together. Mostly they didn't need him any more, which in his more honest moments he could admit had always been half the attraction in the first place. In those days he'd always needed someone -- even better if it was more than one someone -- who thought he held the key to all unlife's secrets.

His drawing power had obviously lapsed. He'd be hard pressed to give a believable answer to anyone these days. He was on his second Scotch, still no Alex, just plenty of less-than-warm memories of Spike and lives past not doing anything for his mood. He was sitting at the bar in Alex's seat, knowing that it was one way he could guarantee himself he wouldn't dodge a confrontation if the man ever did come back into this life.

\----------------------------------------

SOMETIME AFTER THREE in the morning, Alex walked through the door, rough and beautiful and tossing a grin off to Sharon without an ounce of effort, the smile secure on his face until his gaze found Angel at the bar. He kept striding toward him, face hard and frozen, but at the last minute turned and sank down into Angel's usual booth.

He didn't just leave, Angel noticed. Did that mean he was supposed to go over there? Shit. Just having him within reach was clouding Angel's mind, making it difficult to think about anything other than the sweet taste of vodka lingering on the man's lips. Oh, fuck. He signaled Sharon and asked for a bottle of the beer Alex liked, tried to dodge the knowing look she served with it, and made his way over to the booth.

He stood there and after a long minute Alex looked up, his eyes carefully guarded.

"What, lost your day job?" Alex asked, voice as unforgiving as his eyes. He was not going to make things easy, that was for sure. But Angel had always been the kind of man who stood and took the beating until it was over, never fought back, never cried. He knew how torture was supposed to work, and it never got easier because you complained about how much the sting of the whip hurt your delicate shell. "Oh right, I forgot," Alex went on. "How *does* a man of your..." Alex trailed off a little. "Of your kind, shall we say, make an honest living? Night jobs just don't pay what they used to. Do janitors have a union now?"

Angel didn't flinch, waited a beat and then sat down in the same place Alex had been that night a week ago when he'd been charmed so quickly, so completely with just a few words of shared truth and a sure hand. It was much easier to go along with that than initiate it, Angel realized. It was easier to take the abuse than dance a reel with the man behind the curtain.

"What are you doing here?" Alex asked directly, suddenly seeming bored by the schoolyard taunts.

"I was looking for you," Angel said.

"What, you got lost on the way over?" His fury had receded just a notch, maybe, but Angel still wasn't sure what he meant. When he didn't answer, Alex said pointedly, "It took you long enough."

"It's been a busy week." That sounded lame even though he knew it was true.

"I bet." Alex's anger was all over the map -- his voice kept swinging from annoyed to disgusted to mildly put-upon, all within a few words' reach. Angel didn't know which to respond to. "Well, you bought me a beer, so I guess everything's okay now," Alex said, the sarcasm heavy though his voice was soft. "Can we skip right to the part where you start screaming at me minutes after you've come up my ass? Because, frankly, that was my favorite part."

The thing about Alex's particular brand of torture was that its roots were more in hurt feelings than evil manipulation. And it was *mean*. "I'm sorry," Angel said, meaning it but not sure how to say something more elaborate without further angering him.

"Good for you," Alex spit back with a curled lip. "Actually, I'm glad you showed up, because there was something I wanted to ask you."

Angel merely raised his eyebrows, afraid to ask at this point.

"I've put some crazy shit in my body, but this was a new one for me." He looked Angel right in the eye. "Do I need to be worried?"

"What?" Angel was momentarily puzzled. "Oh. You mean because we didn't..." He trailed off. This was definitely new territory. "Alex, no," he said, a little embarrassed. Jesus, how did men talk about this all the time like it was anything but unnatural? "I can't... I can't give you anything."

Alex nodded once, the cruelty still hovering, visible only in the deep crease between his eyebrows. "Yeah," he said, nodding again like it was the answer he'd expected and therefore didn't deserve any kind of reward for being correct. "You made that pretty clear." He slid out of the booth and was out the door before Angel could answer.

\----------------------------------------

ANGEL DROPPED A twenty on the table and tried to catch up with him. Tried to figure out what he'd say when he did, how he'd get this mess back into his control. More importantly, how he'd get Alex naked, because as justified as Alex was in his disgust with Angel, as much as he knew this was all really his fault for being such an asshole, he'd had difficulty concentrating on any of that.

Well, that was all easy enough, he guessed. It wasn't like he'd never had to chase after a man before, make it all up to him, do a little work to get his clothes off. Just because he hadn't done that in more than a few years didn't mean he'd forgotten everything he knew about men and desire. When he turned the corner, the scent of Alex's anger became a light calling under his nose, almost burrowed under his skin, led him in the right direction, and he broke into a jog. Then it was stronger, more concentrated, and he slowed down, letting his powerful eyes adjust to the dark and feel out shadows for the man's shape. There. A block or so down, leaning against a chain-link fence, smoking a cigarette.

Would he want Angel to be contrite? Or hungry? Maybe both, Angel thought. He was quiet as possible in those damn shoes, easing his way down the alley toward Alex's silhouette. He didn't seem to hear him coming and Angel made his way closer, closer, until he was just a few feet away. Then Alex dropped the cigarette with a sharp twist and pulled a gun and the cold metal was thrust in Angel's face.

He didn't say anything, waited until Alex's eyes could make out his features and recognize him in the night. And then he stepped back.

"I guess I deserved that," Angel said, holding up his hands a little in a gesture of surrender. "And probably much more," he allowed, watching Alex's face soften as he put the gun away, took into account that Angel had been trying to find him. Angel took a step toward Alex, letting the shorter man fall back a little against the fence before he bent in to kiss his mouth. He was gentle at first, apologetic. Alex leaned back into the give of the chain, pulling Angel with him, and Angel attacked the man's mouth more intensely, running his hand down Alex's chest and giving a hard twist to the erect nipples barely visible through the tight, fraying black T-shirt. Alex moaned, or tried to, but Angel wasn't letting go of those lush lips, so it came out like a purr deep in his throat. It was the sexiest thing Angel had ever heard, and his hands were unbuttoning Alex's pants before he'd meant to but they seemed to be acting on their own at this point.

Which is why they kept moving even when Alex had pulled away and was saying, or moaning, "Wait. Wait, Angel." Alex gave him a gentle push and he came back into himself, stopped his hands. "Not here, Angel."

"What?"

"Let's find a bed somewhere."

"Why?" Angel's verbal skill level was apparently hovering around the one-word question.

"Because I still have bruises from the last time," Alex said against his neck, kissing him a little, and Angel could feel the grin that lightened the complaint. Alex was rearranging his clothing, tucking himself back in. "I know somewhere we can go," he said with a reassuring tone. "It's nearby."

They climbed the three flights of stairs in an apartment building just down the street. Alex stood in front of the door, trying to block Angel's view, he guessed, but he could hear the sound of a lock being picked. Alex was good at it, and somehow that made all of it more right -- they shouldn't be there, just like they shouldn't be doing any of this in the first place, and at a certain point it was just easier to do everything wrong rather than balance good and bad every moment.

Mostly, Angel was trying to keep his hands off Alex for a few seconds, to just think about how in a minute they could both be naked and getting to feel more of each other than ever would have been possible in the street below. That line of thinking didn't make it much easier not to touch him. But there was the click of the lock and Alex was tugging him in, saying "C'mon" in this impatient little-kid voice that made his legs tremble a bit, and then they were inside the neat, carefully cleaned apartment.

"Don't worry, there's no one here."

"Whose place is this?" Angel asked.

"Just some guy I knew."

Angel could smell the faintest hint of blood under all the bleach, but he didn't even care at this point what Alex was doing breaking into the apartment of a dead man, how it was he could be so sure nobody was around. Alex wore a defiant grin, a little bit like a cat with feathers in his mouth who wasn't ashamed, didn't think he'd been caught and wanted to lead you right to the empty cage.

And then, as if that weren't enough, would expect praise on a job well done. Well, if that was what it would take, Angel would ask: "Knew?"

"He's not coming back." Angel really didn't care. It was a small studio and the bed was just a few steps away. He led Alex over, took off the man's clothing one piece at a time until he was completely undressed before him. There wasn't any light in the room except the half-moon shining through the naked window, but Angel could make out the tender bone of Alex's hip and laid down a row of kisses along it, letting the man's cock snake down along Angel's neck, nudging his ear insistently as he cupped Alex's firm ass in his hands.

Then he took Alex into his mouth, tasted the musk of his skin as he grew hard under Angel's swirling tongue. Alex moaned again, this time without the interference of Angel's kisses, and Angel took him in as far as he would fit, pulled him in even farther with his throat, sucked and swallowed until Alex's hands caught in his hair, pushing him away. He blinked, trying to refocus his vision from the extreme close-up of Alex's strong stomach to this more distanced view of the man's lean body.

Alex bent forward, unbuttoned Angel's shirt and slid it off his shoulders so he was wearing only his leather pants, his dick stretching the fabric in the front as it throbbed. But Alex seemed to want to be in charge here, and Angel really didn't care who took the lead as long as *someone* got him out of those pants, and soon. Alex tugged him up so they were both standing, then slid his hands down Angel's back and down into his pants, slipping between the leather and his ass but barely touching either. Angel was trying to stay in control, not to moan, not to collapse from sheer want before he even got undressed. But it was difficult.

Then Alex's finger was brushing his perineum, stroking across the membrane and pushing into his ass, up further, up to the second knuckle and Angel's knees were not going to hold him up for long. He staggered a little and Alex pulled out, peeled the pants off in one smooth motion. They fell onto the bed, both naked now and kissing fiercely, not that soft all-over kind but rough tastes of each other's skin, hands pushing against a rib cage and then pulling an arm back around, grasping and pinching and tugging, the touch always sure but never of what.

Alex wound up on his stomach, his arms stretched out and holding onto the headboard while Angel's tongue played in circles around his asshole, pushing in just once or twice and then around again until Alex could barely keep his hips still. No matter how many times Angel stilled the thrusts into the bedcovers the man wouldn't stop, so Angel finally put his cock where his mouth had been and the sudden change made Alex whimper a little bit but he stopped moving, let Angel fuck him. They probably could have found some kind of lubricant if they'd tried, but Alex, despite his diminishing cries, seemed to like it better this way. It was bare and a little bit painful for both of them, but if they weren't going to use a rubber in the first place, why slow down to let anything else get in the way?

This was a definite improvement on the alley, even if the double bed was cheap and its springs were protesting the mass and movement of two heavily muscled men trying so desperately to wreak havoc on each other's bodies. He licked the back of Alex's neck and the man moaned deeply as Angel shifted his hips to reach the prostate. Alex's asshole spasmed as he started to come, pulling Angel along and he let himself start to fade away, still inside Alex's warmth, still coming a little even, their bodies pressed so tightly together that the heat between them melted flesh into one solid form.

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END.

Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Look for "Sanctuary," coming soon to a website or mailing list near you.

The next installment might be expedited by feedback to: . ;)

 

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TITLE: "Sanctuary"  
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle  
CATEGORY: Krycek/Angel Crossover (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and The X-Files). References to Krycek/Mulder, light Mulder/Scully UST.  
RATING: R. This story refers to sex between men, contains gratuitous profanity and excessive brooding. Exercise your internal V-Chip if that bothers you and GO AWAY. But if that's so upsetting, why are you watching these shows in the first place?  
SUMMARY: Sequel to "The Illusion of Being Eternal" and "Something's So Wrong With This Heat" (available from me by e-mail or at http://home.earthlink.net/~shanak11/fiction.html). Takes place immediately after "Something's So Wrong..." with Krycek having some post-coital contemplations, flashbacks and still more fun brooding. This is half post-episode musings and half sequel. Be prepared. In a different medium, the whole middle section would be set off in italics, so use your imagination appropriately.  
SPOILERS: Third season BtVS, fifth season XF. Still set between the events of BtVS's "Graduation Day II" and Angel's "City Of" episodes, and in a slightly alternate, less time-dependent XF universe. Light spoilers for XF's "The Red and the Black" and other mythology eps up through US5. I think you'll be a little lost without the first two installments of the story, honestly, but if you don't mind missing back-story, who am I to judge?  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Dialogue excerpts from "The Red and the Black" are the property of 1013 Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. Lyrics from "Sanctuary" are from Madonna's *Bedtime Stories* (Maverick, 1994).  
ARCHIVE: Basement okay, all others please e-mail me the archived URL.  
THANKS: To Chris, and to Janet and Gab for beta. And to whatever muse kept these boys' stories coming even when I grumbled and tried to ignore the voices in my head.  
FEEDBACK: Please... Direct all comments and constructive criticism to . Thanks again to everyone for all the helpful feedback from last time 'round.

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"Sanctuary"  
by S.N. Kastle <>

       "It's here in your arms  
       I want to be buried."  
            -- Madonna

KRYCEK WATCHED ANGEL'S chest as he slept. It didn't move, and when Krycek first figured that out he'd panicked for a minute, not believing that this man who had been so insistently fucking him just an hour before could be dead. So he felt for a pulse. Felt none. But the body was warm -- when Angel had slipped out of Krycek and onto his left side, still shades away from consciousness, he'd curled an arm across Krycek's ribs, holding on tight. Still, there was no comforting rise and fall of the chest. No thud of heartbeat even when Krycek's ear was pressed close against the man's breast, nothing.

Jesus. He really was a vampire. It wasn't that Krycek hadn't believed him before, it was just different to be laying there in bed with a man who didn't need to breathe, who -- despite all the glory of his nakedness and the relish with which he'd handled Krycek's body --would never feel his own pulse race with mad desire. It was light enough now, just before dawn, that Krycek could make out the design on Angel's right shoulder blade, the intricate inking of some kind of bird. It was faded, and Krycek wondered how long ago it had been done, how long this man had been alive to learn how to fuck like that. How many men had watched him like this.

That was crazy. What did it matter? This whole thing was probably a mistake, just two horny guys with one or two stupid things in common. It would play itself out in a few weeks, most likely, and then he'd have to find some other bar where he could waste his time just to avoid any lingering awkwardness. Or maybe he'd move on. He didn't have anything in L.A. worth staying around for, had only ever headed West in the first place because it would have been much more dangerous to stay in Washington.

Angel stirred, slowly opened his eyes and caught Krycek's stare, just like he had that first night at the bar. Krycek leaned in and kissed him, recognizing in a flash that the touch was the most tender transaction yet between two men determined to avoid the business altogether. Angel smiled a little beneath his lips but when he opened his eyes again, he started to move away. Krycek tugged an arm back across his chest, suddenly desperate for him not to go, not to leave him alone in this apartment that still reeked of bleach, the smell now tempered by sex and sweat but irrepressibly grim.

"Can't we just..." Krycek started, then stopped. He didn't want to whine. Deep breath. "Can't we just have one minute before it all goes to hell again?" For a second Angel held still, then he was pushing away again. So fucking Angel in a bed wasn't all that different from an alley, it turned out. He still wasn't going to stick around for another go before he had to bail.

Angel was already out of the bed and Krycek had barely moved. He propped himself up against the headboard, pulled the sheet up around his waist to cover his naked body. He watched Angel, still nude, as he leaned over and sorted through the clothes for his own pants and shirt. "I have to go," he said softly, not looking at Krycek. When he did, Krycek tried to ignore the sad expression on the man's face, tried to concentrate on the fact that he was -- once again -- leaving.

"Whatever," he said, trying to sound like he didn't care, like he was even a little pissed off.

"No, really," Angel said. "I have to leave." He stood up to pull the leather pants up so they covered his naked ass, buttoned his shirt and sat down next to Krycek, seeming to deliberate something. "It's almost sunrise."

Oh. Right. Yet another fun fact of fucking the undead. Angel leaned in and kissed him on the mouth.

"If you stay, it'll eventually be night again, you know," Krycek said, willing his upper body not to move, not to raise his arms like a marionette to hold Angel, keep him from going.

Angel sat back and nodded toward the window: No curtains. "Believe me, I do not look good with a tan," he said, almost smiling. "I look charred."

And then he was gone, the door shut again before Krycek could follow him out and make a scene standing naked in the hallway, calling him back, begging him to stay. Krycek should have known better. Geography changed faster than people did, always had. California would crumble into the sea and rise again from some oceanic earthquake before Angel would change the way he acted after sex or Mulder would stop searching the sky for answers or even he would go back to a life where everything was safe and predictable.

Krycek didn't get out of bed that morning, not the whole day, just watched the sun rise and move across the room, felt the warmth of the afternoon light play on the bedsheets and his still-bare skin beneath them. His thoughts reluctantly drifted, as if he hadn't quite earned the right to let the glow of twilight cast contented memories on possibilities of things left unfinished. Sometime before sunset, he slept. And he dreamed...

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THE DOOR WASN'T quite shut when he said Krycek's name. Mulder's gun was still hanging loosely from his fingers, uncocked and pointed toward the floor as he lay slumped against the couch. But that wasn't why he called Krycek back, and they both knew it.

"Alex," Mulder said again, and how was he supposed to walk away from that? The door paused a few inches before hitting the frame, slowed by Krycek's hand in the jamb. He didn't move to open it any more, just stood silent on the other side. Where he'd always been.

"Thanks," Mulder said, quietly, probably hoping Krycek wouldn't quite be able to hear and would have to come back in.

He heard. But he came back in anyway. "Thanks for what? Ambushing you?"

Mulder just shook his head. Krycek watched a smidgen of blood wind its way down toward Mulder's upper lip. "What?" Mulder asked.

"You're bleeding." He gestured at Mulder.

Mulder drew a finger across his face, looked at the smear of blood on his knuckle as if it had sprung unbidden from an underground source, and started to get up. "If I turn around to go get a towel, are you going to disappear?"

"What? No. Jesus, just stay here. I'll get something." He headed back toward the bathroom, grabbed a washcloth from the hook and returned to the living room. Mulder was sitting on the couch now, head tilted back against the cushions. Krycek sat down beside him, wiped his nose like a 6-year-old.

Krycek was barely breathing, afraid that if he exhaled a word or two might come out that were better left unsaid. Mulder's face, his lips, were so close. He wanted to kiss him again, but not on the cheek this time. He wanted to put his mouth dead onto Mulder's, to taste the inside of his cheeks with his tongue and suck on that beautifully pouty lower lip. He wanted to get back that moment they'd almost had in Russia, to pretend like nothing before or after had really happened to them and they could just feel each other out, touch each other's bodies like free men.

Mulder was just looking at him, waiting, it seemed. For something. Krycek sat back, away from Mulder. Exhaled.

"You're being uncharacteristically helpful," Mulder said, the sarcasm back. His defense mechanisms were so transparent as to be ridiculous. Had he wanted Krycek to kiss him? Is that why he was mad? "Never thought I'd live to see us end up on the same side again."

Krycek still couldn't bring himself to get up, walk out the door like he should. He sighed, let his head fall sideways so it was almost resting on Mulder's shoulder. "I'm on my own side, Mulder," he said wearily. "You should know that by now."

For a second Mulder let him stay there, and then he shrugged himself over to the other end of the couch. "Right," he said, too evenly. He touched the washcloth to his cheek, winced gingerly and then tried to cover the expression with a smirk. "I think I've got it," he said. But the terrycloth was soaked with blood, stark in contrast to the white towel even in the unlit apartment.

"Mulder, I'm telling you the truth about this, about the planned invasion," Krycek said.

"That's why you came in person? To convince me? Let me give you some tips -- your left hook needs some work."

"That's kind of the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it?" Jesus. That's what happened when he exhaled around this man.

"I never left any bruises," Mulder said, a little sheepishly. God, he almost missed those days, when the only sure thing in his life was that Mulder would intermittently kick his ass and swear the whole time there was no one on this earth he hated more and then they could both retreat to their respective corners to jerk off.

"Nothing visible anyway," Krycek said, under his breath. He stood up, looked down at the weary man seated before him. Sometimes they came so close to talking about all of it, but someone always walked away, changed the subject. He leaned down, touched Mulder's cheek with his palm, half-caressed it. That was as close as they would get tonight. "I think you're going to live after all."

Mulder smiled, maybe a little relieved to be off the hook again. "You better get out of here, before Scully shows up and kicks your ass."

Krycek walked slowly, backwards, to the door. "She always did have more sense than you." He paused, hand on the doorknob behind him. "Be careful, Mulder."

THE MAN WHO had been hired to replace Osselhoff wasn't any smarter or more creative with his surveillance techniques, and the bribe Krycek had offered was pathetically small but perfectly effective. Every time he left Mulder's apartment he took the fire escape stairs up to apartment 52, put small stacks of bills on the table and took away miniature digital video tapes.

He should have destroyed them. He should have known better. He should have known better from the start, actually, but his impeccably astute sense of self-preservation had been dissolved by all of Mulder's plausible solutions until he was just a sugary mess of want and need.

Alone in his motel room, he could watch the Mulder Channel without interruptions, the bright, monochromatic picture a constant reminder of all those little-green-man theories his crazy, beautiful former partner found easier to believe than the harsh reality of truth.

"What are you doing sitting here in the dark?"

"Thinking."

"Thinking about what?"

"Oh, the usual. Destiny. Fate. How to throw a curve ball. The inextricable relationships in our lives that are neither accidental nor somehow in our control either."

Krycek watched that segment over and over. Was that about him? Had he so easily done that to Mulder, left him alone in an unlit apartment to question fate and destiny, to babble in Scully's direction?

Sometimes it was easier to watch the tapes than to remember. Krycek didn't see that one until almost five weeks later, until after it was already too late. By then it didn't ease the pain at all.

KRYCEK WAS WAITING later that night when Mulder returned from the base, shell-shocked and war-torn. His shoulders hung down so far Krycek could have sworn that Mulder would soon revert to primate form, would devolve until his knuckles dragged the ground from sheer exhaustion and loss of hope. Krycek's stomach cramped just from breathing the same dispirited air as this man who had so much faith, so much confidence that it could afford to be taken away again and again.

Mulder was shrugging out of his stained trench coat when Krycek found his voice. "Are you okay?"

Mulder started at the sound, reached for his holster before Krycek could stand up, take two strides so his face was lit by the entryway bulb.

"What? You're back. Yeah, I'm great, never better." His throat made a harsh, scratching noise under the words, his sentences untied and a little crazy like some strung-out addict.

Krycek pushed the coat the rest of the way off his shoulders, looked up and down to assess the damage. "How badly did they hurt you?"

Mulder flinched, stepped back. "Jesus, Krycek, I don't even want to know how many people you work for."

"You were close to it, Mulder, or they wouldn't have had to take anything from you."

He dropped his suit jacket next to the couch, rubbed his hands through his hair and sat down in a weary heap. "It doesn't really matter now, Krycek, does it?" he said, clearly having difficulty finding enough self-assurance to push the words out. "It's gone, like my... Like Deep Throat. Like three months of Scully's life and... My father."

At that, he glanced up. Krycek met his eyes, silently accepting the blame for a crime Mulder hadn't mentioned except in the most oblique way in so long Krycek had begun to wonder if it had all just been a bad dream. But Mulder wasn't done cataloging his losses yet, and Krycek wanted to offer something better than attentive listening, wanted nothing more than to apologize for every single thing that had ever gone wrong in the man's life. "It's gone, like thinking I could trust you or least just beat the shit out of you until I forgot about *not* being able to trust you or felt better or something. Like my life, Krycek. It's all gone. I don't even know why I keep trying. I can't hold on to anything that's worth a shit to me."

Krycek kneeled in front of Mulder, let his hands work their way down from the back of the man's neck, across his chest until they settled just above the leather belt fastened snugly around the narrow waist, willing his touch to convey the simultaneous atonement and longing that commanded their movement. Mulder didn't speak but wouldn't bring his face up to meet Krycek's. He seemed hesitant but willing to abandon whatever misguided control there might be left over his own life, to let Krycek take things the rest of the way.

"Sometimes you just have to let go, Mulder." He didn't move, didn't breathe until Mulder finally looked at him and they inhaled shakily in unison.

"I can't," he said, pushing the air back out of his lungs, eyes brimming with tears. Desperate, maybe, for someone to put the pieces of his life back together into something he could recognize.

"You can." Krycek closed the last inch between them, placed one gentle kiss on his mouth and then moved to undo the shirt button by button, following his fingers with his lips. "Just let go."

THE PHONE WAS ringing but Mulder's eyes didn't open. He was leaning against the back of the couch as if his spine had been surgically replaced with a wet blanket. Not asleep, but not really conscious either.

"Mulder." Krycek was still sitting on his heels, the glass top of the coffee table leaving a straight edge of fine pain across his back. He had been resting his forearms -- and, very briefly and very cautiously, his head -- on Mulder's muscular thighs, waiting for both of them to ease their way back to a grim realization of the mistake that had been made.

Krycek shook him by the hips, but Mulder wasn't coming to. He said his name again: "Mulder." Three rings. Jesus. "Mulder, wake up."

He opened his eyes and jerked forward suddenly. Krycek soothed him with a gentle touch to the bare stomach. "Your phone," he said.

Four rings. Mulder shook out his neck, ran his a hand through his hair and, belatedly, one down the side of Krycek's face. Five rings.

"Oh hell," he said, which is on the short list of things a man should never utter when you can still taste his come on the back of your teeth, even if a phone is hollering insistently in the distance. Krycek sat back, pushing that goddamned table with him, moving away, swallowing hard.

"If I don't answer," Mulder said, "she's just going to show up." Right. The ubiquitous She.

He picked up the phone off the end table and shot something resembling an apologetic look at Krycek.

"Yeah?" He answered before the shrill seventh ring had finished echoing in Krycek's ears. He didn't look at Krycek while he spoke, shifted his body just enough that it and the phone formed their own intimate conversation, their own world in which everything probably still made sense and wasn't interrupted by blow jobs from your sworn enemy.

"I'm here. I'm fine, really. Really. Don't worry. Hmm. Uh-huh." Then he laughed, a soft chuckle that could be translated into something substantial only by a person who had spent most every day of the previous five years by his side, saving his ass, fighting his holy war on nothing but faith.

Krycek stood up, almost buckled over from the rush of blood to unused limbs, and not even the sudden motion caught whatever peripheral attention he might still have held at the fringes of Mulder's vision. "Okay," he was saying into the phone. The smile was still audible in his voice, which sounded nothing like that of the hollow, half-dead man who had actually whimpered when their flesh first touched. "Yeah, me too. I'll call you tomorrow."

Krycek had turned his back and was slipping back into his leather jacket when Mulder finally hung up.

"Where are you going?" he asked, finally noticing the absence and, probably, his own disheveled clothing.

"I think I better go," Krycek said without twisting back around.

"What?" For such a brilliant guy, sometimes Mulder could be truly fucking stupid.

"I think I should go," he repeated.

"Why?"

He took his hand off the doorknob, faced Mulder again. If he said it very simply, maybe Mulder would stop asking dumb questions. "Because sooner or later you're going to come to your senses and kick me the hell out, Mulder. Maybe I should save you the trouble."

He had the nerve to practically look insulted. "You think --what?" Mulder asked. "My judgment is impaired or something?"

All right, maybe he wasn't such an idiot. "Wouldn't it have to be?"

"No," Mulder said emphatically. Then he reconsidered the obvious. "Or maybe it was a long time ago." He walked toward Krycek, abandoning the half-assed effort he'd been making to re-button his shirt. "It doesn't matter. I don't want you to go."

Oh god that made things so much harder. Why couldn't he just let well enough alone? Krycek didn't even know any more if he wanted Mulder to want him back or if it made more sense just to have another fist-fight and then he could slink back to his motel and watch it all on instant replay.

"I think maybe you *are* crazy," he finally said, half-defeated by the admission.

Mulder laughed a little at that. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe you did drive me crazy after all, Alex. Think you could get your job back if you told them that?" He'd been walking toward Krycek, boxing him in against the door until he *would* have to fight his way out if he really didn't want to stay.

When he didn't struggle, after another long minute had been counted out in the rhythm of fish-tank florescence and clicks of the refrigerator motor, Mulder let out a deep breath, bent forward and kissed him uncertainly.

Krycek let their lips feel each other out, let Mulder taste his own residue, let the kiss deepen to be sweet and synchronous and inescapable in meaning. Let it be a possibility -- a promise -- of something more significant than bad judgment.

When they came up for air, he still had to warn, "You're making a mistake."

"Then let me," Mulder said, testing the burn of Krycek's two-day stubble against his mouth. "Let me fuck up what's left of my life, Alex. Help me."

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ONE THING KRYCEK was undeniably good at was fucking up his own life, so it wasn't much of a stretch to help Mulder leave the ragged remnants of his even more shredded than they'd been to begin with. He simply let himself become the most extreme in a long line of Mulder's self-destructive tendencies.

For a month, Mulder barely went to work. At first they hardly got out of bed, they were so intent on exploring every inch of each other's scarred and battered body. Mulder said he'd never been with a man before, other than whatever it was that English schoolboys still occasionally did to each other in college, but if that was true it didn't take long for him to catch up.

They started going out to clubs -- not the pretty-boy kind with incessantly monotonous dance beats, but the ones that a good quarter-century of rainbow flags and pride had left underground and untouched. Places where they never would have worn a tie or hob-nobbed with gay staffers from the Hill and that still had back rooms that hadn't seen daylight since the days of mob raids. Places where they could fuck without interruption, drawing only a small crowd on the busiest of evenings.

Then they abandoned the bars altogether for alleys and parking lots and that little bathroom behind the Lincoln Memorial until he almost couldn't get off in Mulder's apartment any more, it wasn't dangerous enough. For his part, Mulder was intense and focused on the sex. He managed to eat and wear clean clothes but it was almost a mystery to them both that mundane tasks like those got done, because they were all really an interruption to the now-normal routine of fucking and sleep. No higher-level thinking required. None allowed.

When they talked, it was mostly in the shower or in those minutes just before the sun came up all the way and they'd finally found their way home. It took four sentences for them to clear the wreckage of four years between them:

"*Did* you kill my father, Alex?"

"Yes. Does it matter that I wouldn't do it again if I had the chance?"

"Yes. And Scully's sister?"

"No. Yes. I was there. I wouldn't do that either."

If Mulder didn't call every day, she showed up and Krycek wound up hiding in the bathroom, so Krycek had taken to waking Mulder around noon and handing him the phone. He didn't listen, didn't want to, went out for a quick smoke instead of suffering jealous spasms in front of Mulder.

Even with years of saved vacation and sick days, Mulder still had to make an appearance at work every once in a while and Krycek would use the time to phone his contacts, check in and assure them all he'd be back in active rotation before they knew it. But he wasn't really sure. Could you spend a life like this? Did you eventually have to domesticate and argue over the remote and mortgages and all that bullshit or could you just fuck your way into old age and dementia? The fact that he considered life after 40 at all was new for Krycek, so he tried to avoid dwelling on the fantasies for long. All he knew was that when they were naked, or when they were even within a few feet of each other and still fully clothed, he didn't need anything else.

On their fourth Saturday together, Scully called at 7 a.m. They'd only gotten back an hour before and if Mulder had figured out how to pick up the phone and throw it across the room without having to answer it, he probably would have. But now he had to go in, had to get paperwork and go back to meet her, had to go to Chicago that night. Krycek buried his head under the pillow and tried to go back to sleep, but Mulder was tickling his feet, pulling the covers off, throwing his clothes at him until he finally surrendered and got dressed.

Krycek remembered how government buildings were never really conducive to late-night or weekend work; the drones aren't paid $400 an hour like their private sector counterparts and as a consequence the premises are usually as stark as nuclear winter by 5:30 p.m. On Saturday, it was empty and hollow and Mulder was dragging him in the back entrance -- "No security cameras here, I promise" -- and down to the basement. Krycek stood in the door as Mulder gathered the files he needed, thought about how he'd never gotten to see the man in his natural environment when they worked together. He was taking in all the posters, all the cabinets stuffed and unlabeled, all the articles from Weekly World News clipped neatly in a pile.

On the rare occasion Mulder had brought some work home to do in the past month, he'd plowed through the cases with the stubbornness of a student held after school in detention, not enjoying a moment of it. But here -- here it was so clear that Mulder would never be a government drone. He was a zealot, plain and simple.

Then the zealot was before him, a wicked light in his face. Mulder stepped back again and dropped the stack of folders on the desk, moved to Krycek and ran his hands greedily around the younger man's torso, pulled him close.

"Here?" Jesus, he really was crazy. Mulder didn't even answer, except to kiss him.

WHEN MULDER CAME back from Chicago three days later, Krycek was sitting on the couch in the dark. He probably should have just left before Mulder got back, but he knew that the man would have been convinced he was murdered, or it was all a conspiracy, and then whatever energy he had left to work with would still have been wasted on Krycek. So he waited to say he was leaving. Almost as soon as Mulder was in the door he was taking clothes off, shedding the time they'd spent apart until he was left wearing only his boxers. But Krycek was not going to wait any longer than he already had.

Mulder didn't take it well. Came out fighting, and as soon as Mulder's left fist hit Krycek's face, he knew he'd made the right decision. This was not the man who had haunted him for all those years. This man was empty and lost and not finding himself by fucking Krycek under the Bureau's nose. He let Mulder keep punching him until his vision got blurry, sent one good right jab out in the general vicinity of the figure before him. Felt it connect, reverberate up his arm. Absorbed the shock of Mulder's weight hitting the floor.

"Mulder, you can't stop me," he said, still not sure if he should be angry or apologetic.

He hadn't even heard the door open, but there was cool metal pressed against the back of his neck and no one else had been there before, so she must have just unlocked it and walked right in.

"*I* can stop you," she said, voice low and tense and unbelievably full of hate.

When Krycek blinked he could see Mulder rising off the floor, hands in front of him like a hostage. "Scully, don't!" he shouted, more loudly than was necessary in the close quarters of the small apartment. She flinched, and Krycek felt the gun pulled back enough that he could turn his head.

He bolted out the door, running running running away from Mulder, from the whole fucking mess, running until he couldn't breathe or feel or realize he was halfway to Virginia. Then he caught a cab back, picked up a month's worth of surveillance tapes and disappeared.

"I can stop you."

"Scully, don't!"

"What?" She'd been distracted by Mulder, that was how he'd managed to get away. From the safe perspective of Krycek's motel all of it made more sense: it was captured on pseudo-celluloid, it was happening to these people who were just actors reading a script. None of it had to be about him. But it was.

"No! Alex --"

She stopped Mulder, grabbed him by the arm. "I'll go after him."

"No." His voice left little room for argument. It was an order that disintegrated into a plea that melted into a desolate keen. "No, Scully, don't. Don't. He's gone. Fuck. Fuck. He's gone." Mulder slid down the wall until he was again sitting on the floor.

"Mulder, what the hell is going --" He was practically naked and, even though they weren't visible on the video, Krycek knew there were hickeys on Mulder's neck that had blossomed into three-day-old, plum-red bruises. And he'd called his father's killer by his first name and cried as the man left. Scully not only had more sense than Mulder, she had all the clues right in front of her. "Mulder, what happened in here?"

He didn't look up, rubbed his hands roughly over his cheeks again and again, scrubbing them or just maniacally caressing his own face. "Scully, just leave me alone."

"No. Are you okay?" Mulder didn't say anything. "What's going on, Mulder?"

"Nothing. It's over."

"What's over? Mulder, damn it. Talk to me."

"I can't, Scully."

"Don't lie to me, Mulder. I'm not stupid. How long has this been going on?"

"A month. I don't know. Russia. Since before you disappeared, maybe. I don't know when I realized... I'm sorry." Scully sat down next to him on the floor.

"Mulder, how could you do this?" The audio wasn't any better than the low-grade picture, but Krycek could swear she didn't sound outraged. Just sad.

"I'm not delusional. I mean, I know what he's done. To my family. To yours. To you. I'm not crazy. It's just that... I just lost all my senses. It's like everything went out of focus and people talking was just ringing in my ears and he was all that made sense any more, because the rest of it didn't matter, because I'd ruined it all anyway. I didn't know how to tell you that. About this."

She was quiet a long time at that. Then she slid an arm around his hunched shoulders, gave him a half-hug, sighed audibly.

"What were you fighting about?"

"What?"

"When I walked in, what was the argument about?"

"He said he was leaving."

"To go where?"

"No, *leaving*. That he wasn't coming back." He fell into Scully's arms, letting the sobs seize his body. "He's not coming back, Scully, is he? He's not coming back."

\----------------------------------------

WHEN KRYCEK FINALLY stirred it was after four, Mulder's name was on his lips and he was achingly hard. And the door was knocking. Someone was knocking at the door, *that* was what was going on. He walked across the strange, small apartment and answered the door naked, not awake enough to find articles of clothing in the proper order and not caring anyway.

Angel didn't seem to care either, didn't say much as he shed his own jacket and shirt and pants and wrapped his hand around Krycek's erection. Krycek stopped trying to think, stopped trying to separate the remnants of his well-worn memories from whatever was going on in *this* reality, let his body be used by this strange man's furious passion without protest or even much reciprocation. Angel fell asleep again almost as soon as he'd come, the kinetic energy drained with a few final thrusts. Krycek liked it like this, drifting on the edge of consciousness and still flattened by Angel's ample pressure, not expected to move or say anything.

Sometimes, there were things he regretted more than murder. Like love. Like breaking someone's life in two and then walking away because you thought it would be better that way, better for him, and it didn't matter about you anyway. And then wondering how, after all this time, it was possible that your hardened little heart could actually still hurt.

So there he was, scarred but sated and sedated by a haunted, desperately unhappy demon who somehow actually seemed to understand what that all felt like. He slept again, deep and dreamless, and didn't awaken until after Angel had gone.

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END. Thanks for playing. Send feedback to . The next section is well underway but the author would still benefit from encouragement.

 

* * *

 

TITLE: "That Sweet Temptation"  
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle

CATEGORY: Krycek/Angel Crossover (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and The X-Files).  
RATING: NC-17. This story is dependent upon graphic depictions of sex between men, not to mention some gratuitous profanity. Exercise your internal V-Chip if that bothers you and GO AWAY. But, just out of curiosity -- are you lost or something?  
SUMMARY: Angel is still hungry for Krycek but resists any kind of real entanglement, and they each learn a bit about the other's past. Hints of Krycek/Mulder and Angel/Spike.  
TIMELINE: Fourth in a series: (1) The Illusion of Being Eternal, (2) Something's So Wrong With This Heat and (3) Sanctuary, all available at the Basement, from me via e-mail or at http://home.earthlink.net/~shanak11/fiction.html. I, obviously, recommend reading them in order but it's not absolutely necessary.  
SPOILERS: Third season BtVS, fifth season XF. Still set between the events of BtVS's "Graduation Day II" and Angel's "City Of" episodes, and in a slightly alternate, less time-dependent XF universe in which the events of "Terma," "Tunguska" and "The Red and the Black" exist but most following those eps do not. I've tried to stay within the characterizations presented in the Angel spin-off even though these events take place before that show's arc.  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Lyrics from "Soul Free" on George Michael's *Listen Without Prejudice* (Columbia, 1990). That man's songs all sound so slashy that it's hard to choose just one that fits.  
ARCHIVE: Basement okay, all others please e-mail me the archived URL. Originally posted on 9 May 2000.  
THANKS: To Chris, for always encouraging my creative tendencies, and to Gab for beta.  
FEEDBACK: Please... Direct all comments and constructive criticism to . Thanks for all the helpful encouragement sent about the past three pieces. Please keep it coming!

* * *

"That Sweet Temptation"  
by S.N. Kastle <>

           Now it seems to me  
           Some things have just got to be  
           The games we play  
           Break up, make up day by day  
           And I don't want nothing to change  
           I don't want nothing to change  
           Because when you touch me baby  
           I don't have no choice  
           Oh that sweet temptation  
           In your voice  
           Higher, higher  
           Won't you come with me  
           Baby gonna get my soul free  
                 -- George Michael

FEAR ALWAYS MADE them cry, even when the threat of danger was over. Then they looked at him and were afraid of what their safety would cost, what promises or favors he might demand in exchange. That was why he never stuck around, why he left as soon as it was clear they would live, why he hid his face in the shadows and hoped they hadn't seen it change.

The boy was maybe 17 but trying his damnedest to look more like a 13- or 14-year-old kid who could command an extra $20 a trick. The vamp who had been sucking on his neck was gone, just another layer of grime on the hustler's dingy jean jacket, but the blood still stained the frayed collar. As tears welled in the boy's wide, scared blue eyes, Angel stepped back, the coppery smell of the open wound making his throat work against his will, forcing him to swallow compulsively, again and again.

"Just go," he said, pushing the words out but afraid to unclench his jaw, scared that it might, on its own, seek out the meal it so clearly thought it deserved. The kid was too frightened to go anywhere, and Angel stepped closer, arm outstretched to shove him away. But instead the boy gratefully dropped to his knees, bending his head toward Angel's groin like a prostrating monk awaiting an epiphany. Jesus, didn't anyone just say thank you anymore? Angel turned, almost tripping over the boy in his haste, and all but ran down the street. He wanted to spit the taste of his own desire out on the ground but was sure there was far too much more where that had come from.

\----------------------------------------

WHICH IS HOW he came to be standing, again, in front of Alex's door. He'd swung by the bar earlier, right after sunset -- just because he was in the neighborhood, he told himself -- but now he wasn't accidentally in the neighborhood or in the mood to wait much longer and there was still no answer at the door. He thought about kicking it in, seeing if Alex was there but not awake or not interested or if he was really gone. Two days and no sign of him around the bar and Angel was trying to take that in stride, not make a thing out of something that wasn't a thing in the first place.

And then the door opened, and a guy who was most definitely *not* Alex was standing on the other side, a 9-millimeter tucked conspicuously into the front of his black pants. Three more men in dark suits stood inside the studio in various menacing stances, arms poised half-way to their own weapons. Angel turned around to leave but the guy at the door grabbed his shoulder.

"What are you doing here?" His voice was low and tense and not unlike how Alex sounded when he was angry. Must be some special elective at the School of the Americas.

"I'm just leaving," he said, trying to.

"You looking for Krycek, too?"

Krycek? Right. He'd said he was Russian. "No."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"Got the wrong address. Sorry for the confusion." Angel pushed the man away, not too hard but enough to show he was serious. Then he went back to the bar. What he really wanted was some release, but if that wasn't an option, a few drinks would have to do.

\----------------------------------------

ALEX WAS AT the bar when Angel got there the next night, just sitting and talking with Sharon and drinking beer. It still wasn't yet nine and the joint was not even close to jumping.

"You're here early," Alex said, instead of hello.

"It's a slow night." And it had been -- the local vamps were laying low for some reason and he'd wanted to give the bar one more shot to find Alex.

"Yeah," he said, looking around, "totally dead." Alex paused, ducked his head a little sheepishly. "Oh," he added, looking up at Angel. "Sorry?"

"No, I meant... Never mind." People were always apologizing for noticing the truth. Sharon brought a drink before he asked and swept the remnants of label from Alex's beer bottle off the counter. "I went to the apartment," he said, not admitting anything, just stating a fact.

Alex didn't say anything or change his expression, but it seemed to Angel that both were only the products of careful attentiveness. Finally: "It's not safe to go there any more."

Angel laughed a little at the understatement. "I know."

"You know?"

He waited, thinking. Was this the time? Would there be a better one between fucking and leaving? Probably not. "Your name is Krycek?" he asked, trying not to enjoy too much the mild shock and fear on the man's face as he belied the answer.

"What are you talking about," he said slowly, flatly.

"That's what they called you. The men there."

Now Alex -- Alex Krycek, Angel amended, now that he could mentally refer to him by two names, if either was really real, anyway -- was being less successful at hiding his panic. If he hadn't believed his "I'm a spy" line before it was hard not to at this point.

"How many?" His voice was so tense that Angel dropped the hide-and-seek and recounted the brief exchange. Something in the details he gave seemed to calm the man and he finished off the beer in one long swallow, leaned a little closer. Leaned into Angel's space until their foreheads were almost touching and Angel could see the hills and valleys in the crinkles at the edges of Alex's eyes, making him wonder if the man was older than he'd first thought. Or just old enough to have spent too much time squinting in the dark corners of his mind.

"I *am* glad you found me," Alex said, all flirty like he had to put some effort into getting Angel home with him. That was kind of sweet. Unnecessary, but sweet. It had been a long time since anybody wasted anything on Angel, let alone charm.

"Your place?" Angel asked, smiling a bit as reward for the gratuitous attention.

"I don't think the boys are really up for a show," Alex said. "But I know somewhere else. Somewhere better."

\----------------------------------------

ANGEL WASN'T IN any mood to waste energy on his surroundings. Alex asked him in and he'd barely crossed the threshold when he was pushing Alex against the door to shut it, slipping a hand under his ass to turn the lock just in case whoever those men were turned out to be better at tracking than they looked.

Alex didn't seem particularly patient himself, walking Angel back as they kissed. They were barely catching the edges of each other's mouths as they stumbled and danced toward the bed in the center of the room. Angel backed into the mattress and, when his feet didn't follow the trajectory of his upper body, fell into a seated position, caught himself from falling farther by jutting his arms out at the last possible second.

Before he'd even caught his balance, Alex was kneeling in the V between his legs, hands sliding through his now-open zipper, pushing the pants aside and down, slipping them off his thighs until the leather was pooled at his ankles. And then there was warmth... He let his eyes fall closed, let his mind devote itself to translating soft licks and deep tonguing into pure pleasure. Fell back onto his elbows and never lost the heat, melting and filling and rushing and god he was coming already, held so rapt by Alex's attention that as he shuddered he couldn't know if a minute or an hour had gone by since he had gotten there.

Jesus. He breathed out slowly, a little shakily. He couldn't remember when he had lost time like that, just let it all go away and trusted that when he came back into himself the world would be intact. Alex was laying his cheek on Angel's bare thigh and for a second Angel wanted to shove him away like he had that hustler. But even more than the night before, he had lust in the buds of his tongue and he didn't think he could walk away twice.

And Alex *wanted* his touch -- moaned at the clash of collar bones when Angel climbed on him, this time without turning him over. Whimpered as Angel pushed one finger, then two, into him inch by inch. He was barely able to slow himself, but Alex's mouth found his each time he was ready for more and the rhythm repeated itself until he could have set a watch by their give-and-take. Or at least an runaway metronome.

And unlike that boy, Alex wasn't paying a debt, or if he was -- and even in this state Angel couldn't discount that possible reality -- it wasn't for something Angel had let him purchase or agreed to sell half-price. Alex was responsible for whatever guided his movements. It wasn't out of gratitude, and if feeling Angel's dick get hard again against the man's tight stomach made that better, it was no fault of Angel's. No credit, really, but no fault.

\----------------------------------------

WHEN HE AWOKE Alex was sleeping, right arm stretched out above his head, that perfect ass almost uncovered by the crisp, white sheets. The dawn still smelled far away and the moon had barely risen but with his eyesight it was easy to make out the open velvet curtains that reached the length of floor-to-ceiling windowed French doors. The whole apartment was light-years away from typical Southern California mission-style decor and about a million galaxies from the dump they'd been in before. A queen-sized wrought iron bed frame dominated the room with a deep blue comforter and pillows matching the drapes. The empty, dark wooden floors could have easily fit more furniture: No couch. No table. No chairs. A small kitchen was set back from the rest of the room, nothing in the fridge; a large bathroom had new, pale blue tiles and what looked like as-yet-unused fixtures. One small, square mirror above the sink, one razor and shaving mug in the cabinet next to an unopened bottle of lube. Two toothbrushes, one unwrapped, and a small tube of toothpaste, barely spent. A chrome rack held stacks of plush white towels, none unfolded.

Alex didn't live here any more than he had in the "borrowed" flat now filled with hit men, Angel realized. It was a room for fucking. Nothing more, nothing less, with small concessions made for his, um, special needs. He wondered briefly what Alex's real home looked like, if he had one. Angel suspected the man wasn't the kind to settle in, that Alex normally couldn't care less where he lay his head. This was clearly all for his benefit and their combined comfort and nothing else. More unnecessary effort.

Alex had survived the short walking tour undisturbed, not even waking when Angel sat on the wedge of bed between the man's broad, muscular shoulder and narrow hip and bent in to smell the sweet residues of dried sweat on his back. He was so close he could see the little hairs on Alex's neck, tiny follicles whose sole evolutionary purpose seemed to be their ability to prickle in dangerous situations. But they lay dormant even when his lips brushed their fine, almost-invisible tips; there was no movement at all as his mouth skated across the unguarded pressure points. They were both safe, for the time being.

\----------------------------------------

THE NEXT NIGHT, after fucking and sleeping and fucking again in a free, unbridled set of patterns and positions, they showered. Or, rather, Alex showered and with the open door loosing steamy clouds into the room -- not to mention a strikingly clear mental picture of the other man's naked body -- Angel gave up resisting the urge to join in. That was what this was all about, right? Urges. Right?

So Angel had his face buried between Alex's legs and was trying to avoid his own knees slipping down the porcelain floor of the shower stall as he opened his throat to take the gentle thrusts of Alex's hips. But before he came, Alex was pulling out, tugging Angel up with a hand under his armpits and guiding Angel's dick toward him, inside him.

The relentlessly hot water washed them off when they were done but sapped his remaining strength. After, as they leaned against the surprisingly still-cool tiles, Alex's right arm was still braced above his head and the back of Angel's was head nestled against his neck. Angel's flaccid cock lightly pressed against the man's ass as he circled his arms loosely around the hips in front of him, holding on, almost hugging. The spray of the shower was hypnotic and only when the fog was so thick that it got hard to breathe did Angel really open his eyes. He gave a lazy, gentle kiss to Alex's bicep, which even in its relaxed state was impressively toned. And that was when he noticed the little scars that seemed to run all the way around the arm, almost like tracks from some toy car in a snowdrift or infinitesimal stitches made with flesh-colored fishing line, just a shade lighter than the rest of the skin.

Alex was breathing so evenly Angel wondered if he'd fallen asleep. He eased back a little, let his left hand drift down to wake him up. Alex moaned, stretched his neck just far enough that the tendons rippled like the tension in a rubber band stretched too far, pushed back against what was quickly becoming, again, something very hard. But Angel was too curious now to be that easily distracted -- what did he know about Alex, anyway? He pulled Alex around to face him, brought the bicep up to his lips and traced the wounds with his tongue until Alex pulled away.

"What, did you get yourself stuck in some kind of trap?" he asked, casually.

Alex's voice went from zero to pissed in two seconds flat: "You could say that."

"Right," he said, taking a step back. "Sorry." And he was. It had been a nice moment -- letting his body just dissolve into Alex's until they boiled like a couple of lobsters in the pulsing massage of the shower. He kissed Alex on the mouth, wordlessly apologizing again. Everyone had his own kind of scars.

Alex exhaled carefully. "No, it's okay," he finally said, shaking drops out of his eyelashes and switching positions so Angel's back blocked the spray. "It's kind of a long story. Some people thought they were helping me." Angel nodded -- he knew what that was like, having people who somehow thought they knew better than you what kind of assistance you needed. "It was in Russia," he continued, as if that explained anything. Lost my soul in Galway, Angel's mind sang, got it back in Romania. That was all just geography. Alex was rubbing the scar almost unwittingly as he spoke. "There were these men, doing tests, and the people who lived near the prison figured out that they wouldn't test you if you, you know... Didn't have what they needed."

"I don't understand," he said, after it became clear Alex thought he should.

"They cut it off. To protect me."

Maybe he was hearing wrong. "They cut it off? But..."

"It's not real." His voice was so matter-of-fact it was hard not to believe him, no matter how ridiculous his words were. "I mean, it's real muscle and skin and hair and everything, but the bones are made of metal."

"I'm still not following."

"Did you see Terminator 2?"

"Terminator what?"

Alex laughed at that, though Angel wasn't sure why. "It was a movie," he explained, far more patient under the circumstances than Angel, shaking his head no, would have expected or probably been himself. "It's like, instead of bone I have a metal skeletal structure from the shoulder down." He was gesturing in an exaggerated manner, like a spokesmodel, pointing with the fingers on his left hand at each of his comments. "And then they transplanted real muscle and skin and all that. By the time it was all working properly I just wasn't up to another month waiting to recover from plastic surgery to remove the scars."

This was weird. "But how is that possible?"

That earned him another chuckle.

"What?"

"Nothing. I just find it amusing that you're questioning the existence of..."

"Extreme possibilities?" Somehow that wasn't as funny -- something flitted across Alex's eyes, brought out the goldish flecks and very briefly hardened his mouth. But then it was gone.

"One benefit of working for... well, governments, is that they have access to classified biotechnology. I traded this for some work I did."

He didn't want to be rude -- it was all just so strange. "Wow," he said simply.

Alex was a little shy then. "Does it bother you?"

"What? No. I just... I'm sorry I didn't notice before."

"Whatever," he shrugged. "It's okay. What can I say, the bathroom is a little more well-lit than the rest of the places we've been."

"Even so, I can't believe I didn't --"

"Angel, it's okay." Alex cut him off so quickly and for once --god, it was so rare between them -- he swore he knew exactly what the man was thinking, that someone else who might have had far more occasion to observe what he had seen never did, or at least never mentioned it. He wondered who the lover had been, what had gone sour between them for the pain to dash so quickly in and out of Alex's expressions on a word's notice. He liked that Alex wasn't an open book, that even after all this time of watching people and observing from close and afar there could be someone who just plain intrigued him.

"It's okay," Alex said once more, breaking his reverie. "Your turn."

"My turn?"

"You've got plenty of scars." Not many for his age, he wanted to say, but didn't. Intrigue, remember? "Tell me about one of them," Alex whispered, making him feel so sexy and naked he almost forgot he already was. Alex was lapping at an old knife-wound on his delt, working his way around to stand behind Angel and letting the water cascade over both their skin, which was flushed from the heat and starting to wrinkle from the wetness. "Or," Alex said, his voice trailing off a little bit as he finished the sentence just inches from Angel's ear, "tell me about your tattoo."

"Nothing to tell," he said, at least nothing to tell without trying to explain Spike and *that* was a story for another day. Sometimes he forgot it was even there -- he had to crank his head around to see it at all. He turned to face Alex. "I got it a long time ago."

"What exactly is a long time for you? I mean, are we talking in decades or centuries or what?" Alex's tone was inquisitive but his face was open and amused, prodding a little bit but skirting that line of how much you want to know about a man you're probably just keeping around to satisfy a semi-suicidal fetish.

"It was in London," he allowed. "Turn of the century."

"Which century?"

"This one."

"So that's a long time -- 100 years?"

Alex was clever -- something else that wasn't necessary, but Angel supposed that for someone who did whatever it was exactly that Alex did, it probably was a little gauche to give the third degree to a fuck buddy without some kind of witty pretense. "Are you asking me how old I am?"

Alex smiled. "How old are you?"

Well, that blew that theory, or else the man was just as good at switching strategies in conversation as he was in bed. "I was made in 1753," he answered. "I was 26 years old."

Alex said aloud what was written on his face: "Wow."

"Does that bother you?" Angel asked, timbre echoing Alex's earlier vulnerability.

"No," Alex said. "You're talking to a man with an appendage out of a sci-fi movie." Damn, he had an adorable grin -- like he was a kid splashing in puddles, drops of water clinging to his eyelashes like babies' tears. How did he do whatever he did and still look so innocent?

"I'm serious." Sort of. Angel turned off the water let the steam envelop them for a second before cracking open the glass door an inch to reach for a towel.

"So am I." Alex said. "I don't think you're a freak, Angel." He took the towel Angel was handing him and ran it over his head until the short-cut hairs all stood on end. And then he pulled out that look again, that playful, seductive, sexy-as-all-hell grin that had gotten Angel from the bar to the alley in the first place. "Besides, it's good for a man to have a little mystery about him. Isn't it?"

\----------------------------------------

END.

Run, don't walk, to "Thief Upon My Bed," which picks up immediately after this one, coming soon to a mailing list or website near you. In the meantime, please send all feedback to .

\----------------------------------------

 

* * *

 

TITLE: "Thief Upon My Bed"  
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle  
CATEGORY: Krycek/Angel Crossover (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and The X-Files).  
RATING: NC-17. This story is dependent upon graphic depictions of sex between men, not to mention gratuitous profanity. I like to think the sex is meaningful and necessary, but some may disagree or think that's not important in the first place. Exercise your internal V-Chip if that bothers you and GO AWAY.  
SUMMARY: Takes place immediately after That Sweet Temptation. Basically consists of Krycek's musings on window treatments, cartoons and the unbearable lightness of wanting to love a vampire. Hints of Krycek/Mulder and Angel/Buffy.  
TIMELINE: Fifth in a series, following: (1) The Illusion of Being Eternal, (2) Something's So Wrong With This Heat, (3) Sanctuary and (4) That Sweet Temptation, all available at the Basement, from me via e-mail or at http://home.earthlink.net/~shanak11/fiction.html. Obviously I think you should read all of them in order, but proceed at your own risk if you don't like instructions.  
SPOILERS: Third season BtVS, fifth season XF. Still set between the events of BtVS's "Graduation Day II" and Angel's "City Of" episodes, and in a slightly alternate, less time-dependent XF universe in which the events of "Terma," "Tunguska" and "The Red and the Black" exist but most following those eps do not. I'm trying, wherever possible, to stay within the characterizations presented in the spin-off (and I welcome and quarrels you might have on that front, truly).  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Lyrics from "The Strangest Thing" on George Michael's *Older* (DreamWorks, 1996). Could this be more perfect? I don't think so.  
ARCHIVE: Basement okay, all others please e-mail me the archived URL. Originally posted on 10 May 2000.  
THANKS: To Chris, and to Gab for beta. And because it's late and I'm getting loopy, I even have room to toss some gratitude in the direction of Chris Carter and Joss Whedon for giving me the latitude of character development with which to put these boys in ... different settings, shall we say.  
FEEDBACK: Please... Direct all comments and constructive criticism to .

* * *

"Thief Upon My Bed"  
by S.N. Kastle <>

           There's a liar in my head  
           There's a thief upon my bed  
           And the strangest thing  
           Is I cannot get my eyes open  
           Give me something I can hold  
           Give me something to believe in  
           I am frightened for my soul, please, please  
           Make love to me, send love through me  
           Heal me with your crime  
           The only one who ever knew me  
           We've wasted so much time  
                -- George Michael

THE MYSTERY MAN himself was sound asleep, skin still warm to the touch from their extended shower. God only knew where they'd found the energy to have sex *again,* but predictably Angel's eyes were closed almost the minute he came. If he had a heartbeat it would have slowed down like a car that had dropped its transmission, Krycek thought, none too morbidly. Sometimes it was hard not to think of the whole vampire thing as one big joke -- he'd always had a weakness for older men, ba-da-bing! -- or in any way that would make it more like a fetish than an actual relationship. Not that this was a relationship. Whatever.

      Krycek never would have figured Angel for a dreamer, but when they were done, when it was light enough, he could watch the man contentedly escape consciousness. And he could sometimes swear that behind those closed eyes there was rapid eye movement, that tell-tale signature. Which didn't mean they were necessarily *good* dreams -- Krycek knew what that was like, to have your nighttime imagination generate horrors miraculously even more disturbing than your waking reality. But the longer he looked at Angel, the more he could catalog what seemed to be the signs of peaceful slumber: Fluttering eyelashes. A relaxed --almost limp -- figure, stretched out across Krycek or a pillow or whatever was within his reach. Occasionally there was the slightest hint of an upturned mouth, which when paired with his strong cheekbones almost made him seem to be smiling at some private joke.

      The more Krycek pondered how this man -- who had displayed such utter hopelessness and despair in their first meetings -- could possibly be dreaming a little dream of happy days, the more he realized that Angel had actually been fairly, well, *up* himself the past few days. Not that they'd had a lot of down-time together, per se, or even a lot of awake, non-sex-having time. But they'd just had something resembling a conversation and it hadn't killed them. Well, it hadn't killed him. And it hadn't done... Whatever it was that happened to vampires if they got killed. Again. Jesus, someone really needed to make a Double Agents Are From Mars, Vampires Are From Venus handbook for this kind of situation. Or at least a pamphlet like APLA was always handing out in bars or at parades -- something culturally appropriate that would take into account the special challenges of having a Grimm fairy tale for a sex partner.

      But if he was going to be really honest, he'd been pretty up and enthusiastic, too, ever since... He grasped to separate the events of the last week into discrete days with their own schedule other than that spent in bed with Angel. He'd had a meeting on Saturday, he thought, about doing some surveillance on a cop. You knew L.A. had problems when city officials were going under the table to hire people like him --especially at his rates -- to police their own. But it was still preferable to having it all in the newspapers.

      So that had been last Saturday, he was pretty sure, and that had been the last night they'd spent in the other apartment, their... Fifth? Sixth in a row, maybe, spent together. Every night, in fact, since that argument he'd finally let Angel win out of sheer lust-induced impatience. He'd worked overnight on Monday and Tuesday, staking out that Furhman heir apparent; so, by that count, it was Wednesday when he had gotten the fuck out of Dodge upon spotting the goons in the building's parking lot. He'd already rented the new space before that, planning to upgrade a little if they were going to continue to spend so damn much time inside and in bed. His meager luggage and weapon collection had spent about three hours there before being transferred to a new motel and a new storage space, respectively, both secured with a new name and a new credit card on the off chance these men were more skilled than the last witless crew.

      If Angel hadn't showed at the bar when he did -- that must have been Thursday, he figured -- Krycek probably would have gone home with the first sure thing that had all the necessary body parts, just to ease the aching in his balls that had been exacerbated by two days and nights slouched in a cheap rental car and one brief nap on a truly shitty motel mattress. That meant it was Saturday morning. Probably. He felt relatively safe in this place -- somehow upscale buildings seemed to conceal his comings-and-goings better with their don't ask atmosphere and easily bribed doormen. And it wasn't like he chose those crappy sub-Motel 6 accommodations because of the price. He didn't exactly lead a five-star existence, didn't care to in the first place. It had kind of been a nice change to spend a little of his excessively large portfolio on something swank and unnecessary that someone else might actually appreciate.

      The only thing that was better about his motel room than this place was that it had a television, naturally not equipped with the promised HBO but with sufficient reception to feed his inexplicable weakness for American cartoons. For one long, crazy moment he tried to imagine being curled up under the covers with Angel, watching "Batman" or something and eating Fruity Pebbles out of the box until both their mouths were stained with red dye No. 3 and they were finally driven outside by incessant Ab-Roller infomercials or reruns of "The Golden Girls."

      Oh, right, and Angel burst into flames or something. So much for *that* fantasy, not that the guy's photophobic issues were going to be the main impediment in such a scenario. Not to mention that Angel's idea of animation probably ran more along the lines of illuminated manuscripts than men in tights, even chiseled, roguishly handsome men in tights who were aided by their dimpled sidekicks in noble efforts to save the world or at least some Gotham matron's dinner party.

      Goofy fantasies aside, he *was* having something that vaguely resembled fun, he admitted. Or at least fairly uncomplicated pleasure with the same person for more than a few hours at a time, which he hadn't done since --

      Well, no point in making that comparison, especially as he'd have to stretch the definition of "uncomplicated" for all parties involved in the analogy. Things were good, leave it at that and be grateful you don't have to shop your aging ass around the meat market for a little while, he thought.

\----------------------------------------

KRYCEK WAITED UNTIL he could make out the subtle difference in skin tone between his and Angel's forearms before he shifted himself out from under the limb that was wrapped around his chest. He drew the heavy velvet curtains closed, glad now that he'd made the effort at least nominally to equip the room. Having Angel there just to look at had turned out to be far more entertaining than cartoons; the guarded edge always masking his features fell away as he slept, making his jaw look almost disproportionately angular next to the relaxed muscles around his mouth.

      Krycek climbed gently back into the bed, propped himself up on one arm. Two hundred and forty-seven years. Unless you were supposed to count those first 26 years, too. Jesus. Either way, that really just was kind of...unusual. A little humbling, maybe. To think that he was probably just one of scores of men Angel had taken to bed, that in comparison to a life spanning more than two centuries -- not to mention the Industrial Revolution and globalization and even television, for Christ's sake --having known someone for a month or two meant almost nothing. He would almost certainly be no more than a forgotten face in a long line of less-than-memorable lovers.

      Not that Krycek didn't have his own share of discarded history. But something about that disastrous month of having Mulder in his life, day in and day out, after years of imagining how that could never be --that pseudo-domesticity had whet his appetite for a simpler existence. Or maybe it was something more complex he really craved: something to come home to or to care enough about coming home for that he might actually take care of himself for a reason other than the usual stubborn, Darwinian self-preservation.

      As he'd made the arrangements for the new apartment, carefully setting the specifications of the sparse accoutrements, he kept telling himself it was just for comfort. It was just the same hedonistic attention to detail that he always brought to sex -- anything for the greater good of a better ride, a more knee-weakening orgasm and an improved chance of blacking out long enough that he might forget the mistakes he'd made to end up wherever it was he ended up that night.

      But this didn't feel like a mistake. It felt like something he could get used to if given half a chance. And that felt a little like hope, which was such a foreign emotion to him that it took a few minutes of concentration on the flutter in his stomach and the twinge of pain in his chest as he watched Angel sleep just to assign a name to the symptoms. He hadn't hoped for much beyond survival in a long, long time. Even with Mulder he had just wanted them to endure each other and their destructive past long enough for a temporary cease-fire, enough time to draw Mulder back from the edge of whatever cliff he'd been ready to walk off of when Krycek had come back. He never really let himself think beyond that and, as much as it had hurt to walk away from the tenuous peace they had eked out, it hadn't been a hard decision to make, not really. They had so much to overcome just to be in the same room without someone getting punched that it seemed like unqualified success to net a moan of pleasure from the man's mouth and not fear for his life because they had fallen asleep in the same bed.

      The thing no one had ever told him about peace, about walking through even the most faint shadow of happiness, was that it wouldn't satisfy his thirst. It just made him want more. It made him want a life again, or for the first time as all he'd ever known before was danger and caution and distrust. It made him a little greedy. It made him look at Angel and want to know his secrets, to know the stories behind every bump or scar on his ancient body, to know what it was that could make his brow furrow and his forehead crease at the most inexplicable trigger. To know what he saw when he closed his eyes.

      But he was kidding himself if he thought this would be easier than putting himself out to pasture in Mulder's crazy universe. He scowled at his own fantasies, at the wasted energy of pretending that something as base as mutual lust could magically morph into a life together. To people like Angel, like him, all that happily-ever-after shit was as useless as a good life insurance policy: No point in investing in worst-case scenarios when there would be no one left behind who might benefit from such careful planning.

      When he looked back at Angel's face, his eyes were open, seemingly trying to read Krycek's expression. He put on his best desirous stare, kissed Angel hard on the mouth and let a hand trail down the man's back to draw lazy figure eights around his tailbone, cruised down farther. This was better. This was what they did best.

\----------------------------------------

"YOU WERE WATCHING me sleep," Angel said as Krycek walked back to the bed with a warm, wet washcloth to clean them up. "Again."

      "I don't sleep," he said, which was usually true but wasn't much of an explanation. "I don't sleep unless I know for sure I'm safe," he clarified, wiping Angel's chest.

      "You don't feel safe with me?" Angel didn't sound hurt, just curious.

      "Maybe I was just taught never to turn my back on a vampire."

      "Turning your back hasn't seemed to be a problem." He was -- at least, Krycek thought he was, maybe, though it didn't seem too likely --actually smirking.

      Krycek felt his lips curve into a smile before he could stop himself. "I suppose if you were going to kill me, you would have done it by now," he said.

      Angel put a hand on his forearm, suddenly intense and unjoking. He said: "Is that what you're really afraid of?"

      Fuck. Welcome to the roller-coaster ride that was Angel's ability to swerve from flirtatious to desperately earnest without a moment's notice. If he hadn't been relatively sure that mind-reading was *not* one of a vampire's supernatural powers, he might be convinced the man had heard everything he'd just thought, even the things he'd been trying not to listen to himself. Was there supposed to be a good answer to that question? Angel obviously knew the truth, could read it on his face -- the one thing that didn't scare Krycek, hadn't in longer than he could remember, was being killed. He finally looked away, wincing at the confession that lapse of control had just cost him.

      "Besides," Angel said casually after a few minutes, as if there had been no pause in conversation, "I don't really do that any more."

      "Do what?" Krycek managed to ask, struggling for a composed, unwavering voice.

      "You know," Angel said, reaching out a hand to play with Krycek's nipples as he talked. "Bite. People."

      "What, you gave it up for Lent?"

      "No, I... I just don't."

      Krycek looked up then. It was hard to tell, but it didn't seem like Angel was kidding. "For how long?" he asked.

      "A long time."

      "So we're back at the whole turn-of-the-century thing again? You're a vampire but you haven't tasted blood in a hundred years?"

      "Well..." Angel seemed to be hesitating not out of unwillingness to tell the story, but as if he were collecting his thoughts or organizing the events into some kind of simple narrative.

      "Well?"

      "I... had a, um..." Angel was flailing a little now.

      "Relapse?" Krycek offered. He knew what that was like.

      "Yeah," he said, nodding. "Something like that. But it's over now."

      If he really wanted to know more about Angel, the chance wasn't going to get more clear than this. Gently, he asked, "When was that?"

      "A couple of years ago. It was only for a few months."

      "And since then you've been...clean?"

      Angel paused, considering semantics, it seemed. "I haven't fed off a human." But his eyes flitted off to someplace above Krycek's shoulder, to gaze into some faraway place or time where he was apparently not welcome.

      "I don't think they make a sobriety chip for that," Krycek said, not wanting to make this any harder than Angel seemed to think it should be.

      "Cold-blooded Killers Anonymous?"

      "Yeah, we meet Tuesdays in the Unitarian Church basement." *This* was not a conversation he'd ever had in bed before, that much was certain. Somehow it seemed to be equally unusual a topic for Angel to discuss, but Krycek wondered if that wasn't just -- he'd been about to say "wishful thinking," but wishing was too close to hoping and hadn't he made a decision about that kind of nonsense?

      Angel was still dancing fingers across his chest, now following them with whisper-soft kisses that drifted farther and farther down his torso. Alex relaxed his neck, sunk back into the goose down-filled pillow and let the new information settle into his mind. Something wasn't fitting. Something didn't make sense the way it was supposed to, if there was still anything to which he could actually compare this experience in order to sort out what felt right and what felt wrong. What Angel was doing just then with his tongue felt very, very right.

      "Oh," he sputtered, suddenly sitting up straight, dislodging Angel. He had located the source of his confusion. "But..." he started, pulling up Angel until they were face-to-face across the bed, bodies lying evenly next to each other, shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip. "Isn't that just what vampires do?"

      "What?"

      He felt unexpectedly sensitive. Was there a nice way to put it? Not really. "Kill," he said. "Feed." That was a little better. "Isn't it, I don't know... Survival?"

      Angel sighed deeply, touched Krycek's face with the back of his hand, letting knuckles drag against the shadow of beard. "Is that why you kill?" he asked. "For survival?"

      Krycek couldn't stop looking into his eyes. He was drowning in the depth of hurt and guilt and possibility he found there. "Yes," he said, testing the weight of the word in his mouth. Yes, he wanted to say. Yes, whatever you want to take or give. Yes, I will. Yes, we can.

      "I did it for fun," Angel said flatly. "I'm not a good man, Alex."

      "But you're not a *bad* man," Krycek said, sounding a little too desperate to his own ears. After all, anyone with half a conscience thought his own sins were incomparably evil, beyond all redemption.

      Angel shook his head slowly, took his hand away. "I'm not a man at all."

      "Look, just because you kill with a different weapon doesn't mean we have nothing in common, Angel. You think sometimes I don't know that I'll spend eternity in whatever hell my enemies can dream up as punishment?"

      He shook his head again. "I've been to hell, Alex," he said, seriously, as if it were a destination, like taking a wrong turn, the left fork in the road when he should have stayed to the right. "When you become a vampire," he continued, "your soul dies. You'll look the same forever but what's inside has been eaten away, blown to bits. *That's* the punishment, except once it's happened to you it seems like a gift because you can't tell the difference any more."

      Angel was so solemn, his voice so even, that Krycek actually got scared for a moment, felt his pulse quicken and something that must be what they called hackles raised on his neck. But... "But you know the difference," he said.

      "That's *my* punishment," Angel said.

      "I don't understand."

      "I killed someone whose family understood what I was. They knew that the most painful torture they could devise would be making me see the destruction I had wrought. They gave me back my soul so that I would spend eternal life with a comparable amount of suffering and remorse."

      It was perfect, Krycek had to admit with the part of his brain that was always calculating odds, laying bets as to how well one tactic might work or be more streamlined and efficient than another. It was so perfect it had to be true.

      "That's why you don't kill any more," Krycek said, understanding the last part.

      "Yeah," Angel said. "Except demons."

      "Wait -- you kill other vampires?"

      "How very Uncle Tom, I know."

      "It's not exactly what I would have guessed, no. But none of this is."

      "I have to try to help people, save them from the kind of death I used to bring."

      "Does that make you feel better?"

      "No. But I have to do it anyway."

      Krycek tipped his forehead until it rested against Angel's, put his arm around the man's waist, let their bodies embrace without the usual insistence or hunger that drew them like magnets. "At least you had a reason for killing in the first place," he said after a while. "My only excuses are a poor upbringing and lousy role models."

      When he spoke again, Angel's voice was deliberately calm and unlike the trembling tone the confession had engendered. "How many people have you killed?" he asked Krycek. "Can you count them?" It was almost a challenge -- a quid pro quo of dispassionate disclosure to bring them back to even ground.

      "Some are harder to forget than others," he admitted, recognizing the peculiarity of actually talking about this, of having a conversation about the ether of his nightmare-world. God, even Mulder, usually filled with insatiable curiosity and persistent questioning, had never really wanted to know this side of Krycek, had not once asked beyond satisfying his own denial about his father's death. A part of Krycek that recognized how little Mulder had ever wanted to understand him wondered if the man would have been intrigued enough by his new-found, first-hand evidence of the paranormal to listen to him seriously. It would have taken at least that much for a proper audience with Pope Spooky.

      "I don't travel in a world of innocent men," Krycek said, hating how much that sounded like a cop-out. As if those lives were somehow less valuable or more acceptable for him to have ended, even though he'd often thought that at the time he pulled the trigger. "Most of the people I killed were trying to kill me first and would have if I'd given them another minute to try. But some people were less guilty than others. A few were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those I can count."

      Angel raised his eyebrows, didn't ask aloud the question written plainly on his face: Tell me.

      Krycek swallowed hard. "My partner's father," he said.

      "You were...with someone?" Angel asked, a little unsure. A little jealous, maybe, said the excitable part of Krycek's mind that he kept pushing away.

      "No, not that kind of partner. I mean, yes. But not then." Shit. This was more complicated that he remembered. Deep breath. "I was sent to the FBI to watch someone. An agent. He was my partner, the person I was assigned to work with. Well, he thought I was working with him." Jesus, he had almost forgotten how entangled it all was --when he'd been with Mulder, he'd just tried to stuff it all into one big inter-office envelope labeled Mistake.

      Then he started over, at the beginning, telling Angel about his father and the KGB and getting recruited at 15 to run reconnaissance missions into Russian universities where young revolutionaries trained in secret. Being approached by the CIA at 17 to trade the danger and intrigue of a floundering superpower for the danger and intrigue of a thriving economy and superficial democracy. Watching his first lover, another Russian agent, killed by unnamed assassins and never knowing if it was supposed to discourage or encourage his shift of allegiance. Being sent to Mulder with no warning that the crazy brilliant fallen golden-boy he was supposed to control would make him wonder how it all could have been different. Make him think he might have been capable of something better.

      But then there was Bill Mulder. And Melissa Scully. And Duane Barry and what happened to a woman when the one person she counted on to come in time for the great rescue got held up, got stranded in a stalled tram, was left dangling above a barren ski slope with precious minutes ticking away, moments whose importance wouldn't be clear until it was too late. And finding forgiveness or at least forgetfulness with the man whose life he'd systematically destroyed, only to discover that neither forgiving nor forgetting would ever truly be enough for two people who had done so much damage to each other.

      Krycek told him all of it, mystery be damned. There was just no simple explanation he could muster, so Angel got the full tragedy, unabridged. And when he was done, when he'd counted out his transgressions like hard-earned rubles at an exchange booth, Angel wrapped both arms around him, kissed his forehead, and they slept.

\----------------------------------------

THE DREAM OF the night never lasts through to morning. That's what Krycek thought when he opened his eyes, rubbed his face in the pillow and registered the empty half of the bed that lay beside him where Angel had been just hours before.

      "You're awake." He rolled over. Angel stood behind him, fully dressed, leaning one shoulder against the wall but not facing him. Facing what would have been the window had the shades been open. How Angel had known he was no longer sleeping without turning was one thing Krycek didn't know. The other was why he wasn't gone altogether. A man who had heard all of that -- had seen that side of him, not just warts and all but scars and dead bodies and love and guilt and hope and hope and hope -- to have seen all that and not hold him close until they woke up together, still entangled in divulgence... Well, it wasn't a good sign. Krycek had never -- *never* -- told someone his secrets like that, not after a life of being taught to do anything but, and he may not have known much about how men made a life together but he was pretty damn sure this was not an indication that things were working.

      When he didn't get an answer, Angel finally twisted around to look. Krycek grunted something resembling an animal sound for hello, shook out his neck and swung his legs to the floor so he was sitting up. Angel kept staring at the drapes, silent.

      This wasn't a race Krycek wanted to win, not if first place meant Angel finally walked away rather than answer any one of a number of impossible questions: Why are you still here? Do you have to go? Isn't there any chance that once, just once, we could find a way to make this work in the daylight without running away scared?

      I don't know. Yes. Not bloody likely. Angel's eyes held all of those responses when he gave in, leaned down to kiss Krycek's mouth with unbelievable gentleness and left without another word. Fuck. *Fuck.* Krycek let his head fall down between his knees, tried to catch his breath and inhale despite the iron mass that was filling his heart and weighting down his lungs. Recognized numbly that he was still alive, was still involuntarily moving blood and oxygen to his limbs and brain and that it didn't matter after all. It just didn't matter.

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END. Please send all feedback to . These boys are turning out a bit more verbose than I'd intended, so I still have a few segments left. Please send encouragement!

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* * *

 

TITLE: "Sweat of Our Sadness"  
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle  
CATEGORY: Krycek/Angel Crossover (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and The X-Files).  
RATING: NC-17. This story is dependent upon graphic depictions of sex between men, not to mention gratuitous profanity. And I think somehow the sex has gotten darker and less fun as things go on. Exercise your internal V-Chip if any of that bothers you and GO AWAY.  
SUMMARY: When we last saw our heroes, Krycek had spilled his guts --and his heart. Angel's not so willing to share. A conclusion of sorts. Hints of Angel/Buffy and Krycek/Mulder.  
TIMELINE: Sixth and final segment in a still-untitled series (sorry), following: (1) The Illusion of Being Eternal, (2) Something's So Wrong With This Heat, (3) Sanctuary, (4) That Sweet Temptation and (5) Thief Upon My Bed, all available from me via e-mail or at http://home.earthlink.net/~shanak11/fiction.html. Jump into the deep end if you don't think backstory is necessary. The water's fine.  
SPOILERS: Third season BtVS, fifth season XF. Still set between the events of BtVS's "Graduation Day II" and Angel's "City Of" episodes, and in a slightly alternate, less time-dependent XF universe in which the events of "Terma," "Tunguska" and "The Red and the Black" exist but most following those eps do not. There are slight spoilers from a flashback-conversation with Darla in "Dear Boy," which you'll probably only notice if you saw the show and shouldn't actually ruin that ep if you didn't. It took that insight to get this unstuck from the depths of my hard drive. We've seen a lot of pre-Buffy flashbacks this season on that show that don't necessarily jive with my projections from this summer, but that's my stories, and I'm sticking to 'em.  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Lyrics from "Caramia" are on the Indigo Girls' *Shaming of the Sun* (Sony, 1997). Dialogue quoted from the BtVS episode "Angel" belongs to Mutant Enemy and Joss Whedon, and I would never presume to pass his brilliance off as my own.  
ARCHIVE: Basement okay, all others please e-mail me the archived URL. Originally posted on 29 December 2000.  
THANKS: To Chris. After all these months of delay, I'm too impatient for beta, so all mistakes are mine and mine alone. A special shout-out to the girls at GAEB for getting me on a listening jag of the original Girls long enough that I finally began this piece in earnest.  
FEEDBACK: Please... Direct all comments and constructive criticism to . Thank you to everyone who has written in the past nine months to encourage my work on these stories (my first foray into slash and by far the longest overall fanfic I've ever completed). I hope you'll let me know your thoughts of the complete series.

* * *

"Sweat of Our Sadness"  
by S.N. Kastle <>

       You love like you're desperate  
       You don't know what love is  
       I thought if there was one thing  
       I could give you, maybe it was this  
       With your head on the bed board  
       The anguished repeat  
       The sweat of our sadness  
       The twist of the sheets  
       I don't want what's best for you  
       Where will I be when you've found it?  
                 -- Indigo Girls

\------------------------  
I. THE ANGUISHED REPEAT  
\------------------------

HE JUST DIDN'T want to think about it. Angel kicked demon ass left and right for five good nights straight, never let his mind wander far beyond the next kill or the next day's sleep. Didn't stop to consider the taste of Alex's skin still wet with soapy rinse-water. Didn't waste a single goddamned minute pushing away thoughts of him as he fell into an empty bed in a deserted basement, more often than not bruised and a little demoralized by the sheer volume of hate and hurt this forsaken city could tolerate and regenerate. Angel didn't want to think about how things might be different, because they couldn't, and just because he was stuck with eternal life didn't mean he was supposed to waste it playing the crude gropings of some kid over and over in his head.

      When none of it had been spoken, it had been easier. Easier not to think about it, not to let it interrupt his routine of patrolling-fucking-sleeping or his knowledge of himself and what might make him want more. But it wasn't those petty crimes Alex had confessed that had broken the spell, all intrigue and James Bond and career criminals playing at children's games of hide and seek except with real ordnance -- though he was wrong that the way they killed didn't make them different, because it did. But it had taken Angel the span of two World Wars to understand those discrepancies, so he wasn't holding Alex's naivete against him on that particular point.

      It was the hope that had done it, that look he'd had in his eyes the next morning that screamed the message loud and clear and deafening in desperation: Show me yours. Want me back. Love me too.

      And none of that was going to happen, not in Alex's fucking lifetime for sure and probably not in his, either. It just couldn't. So he didn't think about it.

\----------------------------------------

ANGEL WAS STILL not thinking about it as he leaned his shoulder against the window-frame of Alex's apartment, curtains tied behind him and the dark, moonless sky that was never quite as black as his thoughts casting no shadow of his form on the wooden floor. He was thinking about how there weren't many places left in the world with little enough light that he couldn't see what he needed to. He was idly wondering if the exposure to constant electrical brightness or the indirect glare of the famed California sun would somehow make his eyesight -- supposedly as durable as his non-existence -- weaken until he was just another middle-aged vamp with bifocals and splinters in all the wrong places that never quite worked their way to the surface, and whether or not his so-called endurance had been designed for the agrarian European countryside or if the ones he'd sired were somehow more evolved, and if Alex might actually *not* show up in time to assuage the pent-up need to come inside him and Angel would have to do without or go somewhere else or if anyone would notice if he were just to lay down on the big bed here and let his own hands make a poor substitute for someone who, if he was being fair and not pissed off or defensive about his own experience and relative age, actually knew his way around those parts pretty decently...

      He heard a key in the lock, the almost-silent twist of the doorknob and three solid steps of heavy boots on pine.

      "Who's there?" Alex's voice was a little high but steady, even, fearless but still careful.

      Angel turned slowly. "Me," he said.

      "Oh." The response was strangely flat. Angel hadn't heard Alex pull his gun but there it was in the man's hand, all steel and swagger, the uncocked safety refracting the pale glow from the light of a faraway helicopter that whirred low over the Hollywood Hills. Alex didn't put the piece away, passed it from one hand to the other like he hadn't decided yet if he might need it and should keep it close. "Would this even kill you?" Alex asked, maybe curious, maybe bluffing. Maybe tempted. "You know, if..."

      If he wanted to, Angel finished mentally, which -- now that he was finally, unavoidably thinking again -- he probably did, with no small justification. "No," he said.

      "Not even with silver bullets?"

      "Something you trying to tell me, Alex?"

      Angel saw a shimmer of white tooth bared in a reluctant half-smile. "No."

      "No," Angel said, answering the original, spoken question as if he'd received a different answer. "You should really stick to staking. Or beheading. And there's always sunlight." He stepped away from the window, toward Alex, into the sight of the gun that was nonetheless still pointed at his midsection. He wished for a moment that it *was* a stake or a sword and that he would be frightened out of the challenge he knew he was about to make, chastised into making nice and playing by the rules.

      But it was just Alex, just a gun, just something he could have even if he didn't really want it. He put his hand around the barrel, ran a thumb down the groove in the handle and over the nub of Alex's knuckle, their touch sharp and fiery enough that it could have lit gunpowder. "And you?" he asked, taunting a little to see how far Alex would let him go with it, when he'd stick up for himself. When he'd remind Angel that you didn't treat people like that, even people you were only using for sex. He put his other hand over Alex's heart, felt the beat quicken through the thin cotton shirt. "What does it take to hurt you?"

      Alex closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose, which flared slightly as he breathed out again, the nostrils trembling delicately, whether out of desire or fear or anger Angel couldn't quite tell. Then he started to pull out of Angel's embrace, saying in a small voice, "Very little."

      "I don't want to hurt you." He meant it. He did, really. But it didn't mean he wouldn't. And anyway it was enough to bring Alex back, to get them out of their clothes and under the sheets in one clumsy stop-motion collision of body parts that moved together and apart without regard for their respective owners' ability to reason or, god forbid, think.

\----------------------------------------

ANGEL STRUGGLED TO keep his eyes open, not to give in to the lurking calm and peace of slumber that beckoned from the horizon. That was how everything got fucked up -- it was in those still-awake, not-safe-enough-to-sleep moments that Alex forgot that this was what they did best. He knew he shouldn't have come back, should have just found another method for climbing out of the detritus of his nightmares. But, god, it was so good here. By far the best sex he'd ever had, without question. It was really beyond that kind of locker-room comparison --completely encompassing forgetfulness, the world and the last two and a half centuries just a whisper of consciousness far, far away from the insistent need to fit hands and cocks and mouths in their proper positions.

      But if he fell asleep, didn't leave until just before dawn, it would all fall apart again. He'd still have to go eventually, but then Alex would think this had all meant that they were fine. That it was due to something other than the fact that Angel had no self-control when it came to the sweat and sadness that coated Alex's skin like perfume. Like pheromones drawing him into an eons-old mating ritual that had not propagation of species as its goal but rather simple, essential self-preservation, numbing the necessity of true connection to allow him survival in the face of assault on all other sides.

      He felt the heat of Alex's arm move to encircle his chest from behind, shrugged it off without thinking twice. Steeled himself to walk out again, to ignore the puppyish look on Alex's face as his motions coalesced into the search for clothing, for escape.

      "What's wrong?" Alex's voice was carefully calm. He didn't turn.

      "Nothing."

      Silence for a minute or something that felt like it could be that amount, nothing against which to measure time's passage except the low hum of the refrigerator and, somewhere else in the apartment building, ambient murmurs that could be a television or answering machine or actual human interaction.

      Finally, with none of the brawn of his earlier half-threats with the gun, Alex spoke again: "Are you sure you're OK?"

      Jesus. This was not going to get easier. Just leave already, Angel told himself. "Fine," he muttered. "I'm just... Hungry." That was good. True, too. He was always hungry, the primal growl just a hair's breadth of self-control from escaping his lips. He knew the slowly churning musculature of his gut was nothing more than a phantom memory; there was no digestion required of his diet, yet his body often felt the absence of sustenance in such infantilized manners as to be mistaken for human appetite. No, Angel thought, what he craved, what he *needed,* stirred murky territories of his mind, primed his saliva glands and straightened his spine and made his dick hard and he was shifting to face Alex now, trying to see him clearly in the dark as his superior vision became compromised by desire. By hunger.

      "Oh," Alex said, tipping his head back to glance upside-down over the edge of the bed at the sterile kitchen. "There's not really anything in the fridge." He settled back into the bed, met Angel's deeper touch with a reassured, almost apologetic smile. "We could order out, or --" Alex's voice trailed off as Angel slung a leg over Alex's hip, readjusting his weight over the man's body so his bulk pinned Alex to the mattress.

      "Oh," Alex said again, thinking he'd misunderstood, seeming pleased at what he took for the right answer. "What do you normally do? About food, I mean."

      "Butchers' shops," Angel muttered into Alex's shoulder. "Meatpackers." He was sucking on Alex's nipple, letting his hands run over Alex's ribs, suddenly awake and alive like a switch had been thrown for his attention span and all he could see, all he could smell, all he could even think about was Alex and Alex's body and Alex's tongue and he was so, so hungry.

      "I don't think they deliver. Certainly not at this hour." Alex was talking aloud, almost to himself, his speech a distant, buzzing interruption to Angel's insistent quest to capture as much of Alex's chest with his lips, to lick the specks of dried semen and perspiration and something that might once have been the residue of laundry detergent transferred from shirt to skin like osmosis and he would give anything to be that close to Alex's body, to wear it on his own flesh like a suit. Alex was stroking Angel's back, urging him on maybe, but it was distracting and in one twist he pulled both of Alex's hands up to meet the headboard, held them there until Alex got the point, wrapped fingers around the metal rails and kept them there when Angel released his crushing grip.

      That was better. It made Alex's torso more defined, the wide shoulders tapering into a solid chest and lean stomach that drew the eye down farther like a sinking stone. Alex wasn't sinking. His dick was hard and dark with its own kind of pangs and for a minute there were the beginnings of fissures in Angel's resolute lust as he tried not to understand how Alex was feeding on this, too. But the aroma of desire seeped into his brain, stirred the base of his back to a tingling, throbbing point of momentum that thrust him up, up, mouth skirting across the landscape of flesh he'd just mapped until his nose bumped against the left collarbone.

      He let his tongue drag across the ridges of the outcropping like a needle on a record, falling and rising with each skeletal groove until his lips were buried in the pocket just underneath Alex's jaw where the pulse surged and receded, a tidal wave of lifebeats, and his hand torqued Alex's chin away and his teeth were millimeters from the jugular, each rush of blood to and from the heart bringing the vein closer.

      But then there was another scent making him gag, the stench almost like a taste, filling his throat with bile. The abrupt flood of unmistakable, mortal fear gushing from Alex made him pull back. Alex's hands still clutched the iron headboard, but his eyes were squeezed shut and his breaths were short and choppy. Oh fuck. Fuck. What the fuck was going on? Angel reeled, tried to stop the approaching panic by blinking hard. When he blinked a second time Alex opened his own eyes in synchrony, met Angel's stare.

      "What?" Alex choked out, his voice high and wary. Scared. Like if he said the wrong thing he could get hurt. Or not.

      Angel was frozen, betrayed by a desperate body that still pushed an erection against Alex's thigh even as dry heaves racked his frame and his elbows quivered from holding himself aloft, apart.

      Alex slowly brought his arms down, cautious like Angel was a house of cards that would collapse in the slight wind of motion. He pulled himself up into a sitting position, shifted Angel until he was straddling his waist, still immobile. Angel watched the adjustments, let himself be arranged, but it didn't bring him back from the edge of terror where he stood in his mind. It was all deathly silent, no functioning sonar skills, no sight except a red glaze of dread that filled his head like he'd been punched in the eye.

      Alex touched his arm lightly, making the vision return in a rush and after a while the sound returned, too, just Alex saying over and over, "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay..." until he must have caught the change in Angel's face, saw that he was back, awkwardly trailed off into silence.

      Speech did not come back so easily, not until Alex kissed him lightly, sat back and slowly, deliberately, offered himself with a tilt of the head and a calm stare, though his Adam's apple bobbed with vague doubt. It was as if he thought it was the only way Angel *would* stay and he'd decided it was worth it. That Angel was worth it.

      Then he was shoving Alex, falling backwards over himself trying to stand up and step away from the bed, words tumbling out: "What the fuck are you doing?" Angel hit the wall with his ass, pressed his palms flat against the cool brick and let the solidity stabilize him, temper his free-fall of blame.

      "Would it kill me?" Alex said softly, still holding his gaze, like the answer made a difference.

      "What did you think I was going to do?" His words were low and mean and he couldn't help it, they just came through his lips burning with venom, and Alex flinched, blanched, regrouped and recovered all in a flash. Angel was still slouched against the wall but tried to move away as Alex slowly climbed from the bed and approached him. But then

Alex paused, bent down and stood up again with Angel's shirt and pants in his outstretched hands.

      "Get dressed," he said firmly, fully possessed and in control. Angel did, slowly, not wanting to face the moment when he'd have to look Alex right in the face, afraid that the shame that would emanate from his own visage would be conveyed as need. But when he'd buttoned his pants, Alex's back was to him, shirt halfway over his head. And when the man turned around, all he said was, "Are you ready?"

      "For what?"

      "I think we should go out." He said it like an order. Angel shook his head, a little scared himself just then of that side of Alex, of what would happen when he denied the request.

      "Yes," Alex barked before his face softened again. "There's a 24-hour restaurant right around the corner from Verve. We'll have a steak and go dancing."

      "I don't dance." Especially not somewhere like the Verve, all muscle boys and techno.

      "Fine. We'll just go for the steak. Extra rare, right?" He wasn't being cruel, not quite, but the gloves were off. "Or..." Angel looked up, waited for the next punch. "I heard about this place out in Venice that takes care of bodies. Or blood. They can clean it up, get it for you, whatever." Angel couldn't decide if it was reassuring that Alex knew things like that or if it was a sign he really should just walk out, right that second. "We could go there and then out to the boardwalk or something, just walk around, hang out."

      *That* was not going to happen. He shook his head.

      Alex sighed in frustration. "I would just like to see something other than the inside of this fucking room all the time," he said, giving up.

      "Then go," Angel said, meaning it. He thought.

      Alex shook his head around in annoyance, put up his hands like he was shoving away. "Whatever," he said. "Fine, I will. Make sure you pull the door all the way shut when you take off, okay? That way it will lock behind you."

\----------------------------------------

FOR ONCE, HE didn't leave. There were no chairs, so Angel made up the bed, took off his shoes again and sat against the headboard to think --exactly the last thing he'd ever intended to do as a way to finish off the night. He probably should have left and done the soul-searching at his own place but somehow he knew that if he left when he was angry, he'd never be back. That wouldn't be the end of the world, not even close, but he wanted to be sure he was ready for something that final.

      It had all just gotten way the fuck out of hand. From the very beginning, fucking in the alley -- that wasn't him, or not the him of the past century. But somehow he'd done it anyway and now there was this piece of him that wouldn't stay quiet, had been untamed, unleashed and was going to be run hard and put away wet until he collapsed, truly spent from the sex and the anguish and the tentative equilibrium between good and evil that left him perpetually off-balance and almost falling. But tonight... Tonight he had gone head over heels tumbling toward disaster.

      The only reassuring thing at this point was that he couldn't in a million years imagine himself being happy with Alex, not happy enough to have to worry. He couldn't even look at the man without a searing wound of shame splitting open in his gut, whatever had momentarily stitched it together rent once more by indecision, by guilt. If, that is, there was even any hope after all he'd done that in some distant, faraway land the specter of joy might lurk, ready to pounce when least expected -- well, even at his least depressed Angel couldn't imagine a world where that was true.

      If he'd never drunk from Buffy it would all be easier. One second he'd been delusional and feverish, tailgating death and even looking forward to it if it meant he could just see her one more time, know she was all right without him. The next second he'd been flying, the life -- her life -- coursing through his body like plutonium and he was nuclear-hot, he was a physics equation of kinetic energy and life and motion. And her body was so light and little in his arms, so deficient of all the things it needed to remember to stay alive that he had to tell himself -- he actually said it out loud in the car as he sped to the hospital, as if Buffy would straighten up in the seat and fix on him with a response -- you *cannot* will her back, you cannot take this astounding level of vivacity like nothing you've ever known and pour it back into her veins. And if you try you will kill her for sure, or make her something much, much worse.

      To know that and live like nothing had changed, like any blood would ever be as rich or filling or simple -- well, that was why he had to leave. And when Alex had bared his neck with such desperation all he could think of was Buffy at the Bronze, crossbow on the floor and so brave beyond her years, whispering, "It's not as easy as it looks," and she was always even more wise than she was brave, even back then. *None* of it had been easy. And he knew with more confidence than anything that had passed between him and Alex that taking what was given would mean he'd leave this, too. He'd have to go and never look back or it all would have been for nothing, he would have learned absolutely fucking nothing, not about how drinking from a criminal's neck was no different than that of a helpless babe's. It would mean that even when given a second chance -- or a third, if you counted being returned from Hell in the first place -- he'd still have skirted the responsibility of whatever dim purpose he felt calling at him in a foreign tongue.

      But Alex lit him on fire from the inside out, his skin radiating at just a fraction of the burn beneath the flesh, like some undiscovered sun he'd accidentally swallowed whole. Alex would have to be more than patient to actually speak to him again, let alone let him near his sweet body. He'd have to be a fucking saint. One thing Alex would never be mistaken for was a saint.

\----------------------------------------

THE SUN CAME up before Alex returned. Angel closed the curtains, dozed in and out, still sitting up. Then Alex was in the door, pulling someone in behind him, a noise that sounded suspiciously like a giggle generated by one of the two as they kissed sloppily against the wall. The other guy had his hands in Alex's pants, working the zipper down and slipping to his knees as soon as he'd released Alex's dick and could greedily suck it off.

      Alex was guiding the man's head, moaning and grunting, face slack with pleasure. Angel knew he should say something, but somehow a polite cough didn't seem appropriate. When the guy briefly came up for air his eyes made a quick scan of the surroundings, saw Angel sitting on the bed.

      "You didn't tell me you lived with someone," he said, looking up at Alex and shooting for casual but hitting something closer to put-out.

      "I don't," Alex said, opening his eyes slowly like he knew he'd be annoyed at what he found. He glared at Angel.

      "Should we stop?" The boy was cute, younger than Angel had thought at first, but good-looking in the way that turned heads more to catch the body than the face.

      "I don't see why," Alex sneered.

      The guy looked at Angel. "Do you want to, you know, join us?" The invitation seemed, ironically, rather obligatory, Angel thought. Good manners more than desire.

      "He just wants to watch," Alex said, all cold water and vinegar and determined, clearly, not to let Angel ruin his night on the town. "Is that okay?" he asked the boy.

      "Whatever." He shrugged, went back to work.

      Alex closed his eyes, forehead wrinkled in concentration as he clearly blocked the rest of the apartment from his mind, let the trick do what he obviously did best. So well, in fact, that for a minute Angel wondered if Alex was paying him. But that was pretty goddamned egotistical if he was being honest about things, and if he wasn't going to be honest about his jealousy or his lust or his terror then he should be walking out the fucking door instead of biding his time, studying Alex like the scene was an instructional guide to his lover and not a slap in the face.

      The guy was thoroughly patient and teasing and dexterous and Alex was coming, his head colliding a little with the wall as his hips' movement sent his neck back for balance, but he didn't seem to notice or care about the repeated thuds. When it was done, the guy sat back on his heels, wiped his mouth not inelegantly and stood up, pulling Alex's pants along for the ride.

      "I should go," he said, casting a wary look in Angel's direction.

      Alex opened his eyes again, followed the boy's gaze to the man still sitting on the bed and then refocused on his conquest. "Do you want to stay?" It sounded like a sincere if dispassionate invitation and Angel wondered what would happen if the man accepted.

      But he wasn't going to -- Angel could read it the way he shifted weight from one foot to the other and smoothed a hand across his lips, this time with far less panache.

      "I think I have to be somewhere," he muttered, not even looking Alex in the eye as he spoke. It made Angel suddenly mad on Alex's behalf -- that skanky little fuck not even having the decency to come up with a believable excuse to justify his discomfort with the situation. But Alex didn't seem surprised or hurt or anything except a little worn around the edges as he kissed the guy goodbye.

      "Thanks," Alex said, clearly meaning it and not just because Angel was there to overhear.

      "Any time," the guy said casually, out the door and gone a second later. Alex stood holding the handle after it was shut, wouldn't turn and look at Angel even though it was over now and they were alone. When he finally moved it was as if he'd never walked out in the first place, Angel thought. Except that Alex's stare was fire and ice all at once and Angel suddenly wondered why it was that one extreme would kill him but the other merely cut his fragile sense of self to ribbons.

      Alex looked like he was maybe going to say something, or that he thought Angel would, but Angel felt frozen and groggy with emotion. Alex was so beautiful even when he was pissed, Angel was thinking, even when he was too busy hating Angel's guts to wonder what the fuck he was still doing there. His green eyes were cold and maybe a little hurt and his jaw muscles flexed in the hollow of his cheeks, holding some cruel gibe at bay but only barely so.

      Finally, some kind of decision apparently made, Alex shook his head as if to himself, wrinkled his nose and sniffed his shirt. "Jesus, I *reek* of cigarette smoke," he said, striding purposefully toward the bathroom, talking over his shoulder as if to a constant fixture in the room. "Not to mention whatever they put in that fucking fog machine." He looked at Angel, menace flirting at the edge of his irate glare. "I'm taking a shower," he said, the look making it clear that Angel was not welcome even though he didn't shut the door all the way.

      Angel heard the rush of the water, the zip of jeans and the movement of ball bearings in the shower door frame, then the subtle distinction of skin beneath forced flow, not at all the same as the noise the spray would make against unoccupied tile. And then there was Alex's low singing, something about deserts missing rain that he'd heard more than a few times while lurking at the Bronze, not quite as upbeat without the steady drumbeat to back up the lyrics. As if it were that simple, just the thirsty scratch of a dry longing, an irritating mosquito bite that kept hampering your easy sleep and was nothing at all like the dead reckoning of fatal mistakes made by one who hadn't cared at the time what fallout might come. But a parched, yearning landscape that so rarely knew what it was like to bask in contentment -- it was just never that simple.

\----------------------------------------

      END part one.

\-------------------------------  
II. LOVE LIKE YOU'RE DESPERATE  
\-------------------------------

KRYCEK HAD KNOWN what was coming before Angel made his first move, had realized it that horrible morning after he spilled all his fucking secrets to Angel and the man had walked away without a backward glance. He'd known then that there was one way to cut his losses -- which meant leaving Los Angeles, right then -- and just one way to win the game. Which was to give Angel what he really wanted, even if he'd never ask for it or even say it out loud or to himself in the dark corners on a lonely sun-drenched morning. He knew what Angel craved, what he was hungry for, recognized the answer as easily as he acknowledged that he'd never been the type to cut his losses.

      He'd played out a hundred different scenarios to get them to that end game before Angel inevitably showed up in the shadows of his apartment, hard and a little desperate but still scorchingly beautiful and magnetic and he barely had to follow a script because Angel was skidding down the slope to Hell's gates with almost no prompting, just an exiled soul on a runaway rollercoaster.

      So he had played it cool, let those years spent impersonating a good man kick back in. It turned out that the time he'd passed being someone who Mulder could trust and even love a little made the transition too easy to spend more than a moment in consideration of his actions without the possibility of getting lost in the loss all over again. He'd been brazen and playful with the gun and the threats, enough to make Angel think he wasn't entirely spineless but just in need of a good fuck, until that was exactly what he got. And that had almost made him forget what he'd come there for in the first place, until Angel misplaced his charisma long enough to remind him again.

      And then all he had to do was let Angel's soft lips slide up his skin until his mouth was so close that Krycek would have had to push him off the bed to make him stop because turning away would only provide better access to his veins, and it was just like the moment before you hit a man when your arm was in motion and the impact was impossible to avoid even as your brain anticipated and translated the knuckle-crunching pain of contact. Krycek's eyes were almost closed, his partial peripheral vision enough to gauge the proximity of Angel even without the body heat or breath he'd come to understand were tools for measuring the distance of a lover once taken for granted. Playing Russian Roulette blindfolded had gotten simpler with practice and even with his hands clasped above his head, Krycek knew that Angel was buried up to the hilt in hunger.

      He wished his hands had, in fact, been bound -- by rope or cuffs or anything more than acquiescence, so that in the aftermath he would have had some kind of excuse. So that he would have been able to say it was coercion, not misguided free will, and even if he always knew that was a lie and carried the weight of the falsehood for whatever lousy coda life afforded him, it would still have been a more succinct explanation than the truth. Which was that Angel hadn't wanted him after all, or not a him he still knew how to be, the kind that settled for mediocrity when he had looked bliss and despair in the eyes and now knew either would be better than neutral. If he couldn't be in fifth gear, he didn't want to drive.

      When he left Angel, who was dressed again but still hovering around comprehension of the shit that had just gone down, Krycek had thought that was it. It was over. He'd leave L.A. the next day and try New York or Hong Kong again or maybe even traipse through Washington long enough to remember that he was the one who set limits in a relationship, not the one who took what he could get gratefully and pathetically.

      He did go to the Verve, though he skipped the steak, rare or otherwise, in lieu of dancing shirtless under the electric heat of lights and muscles until the music and the beat just burrowed into his brain and the memory of Angel was like evaporating sweat.

      Then he caught the blond's stare and developed another kind of appetite altogether. He had just wanted to remember what it felt like to come without caring about what happened next, without it having to mean anything or never be enough. He honestly hadn't noticed Angel in the room until... Fuck, what *was* his name? Scott, maybe? Good enough. Until Scott had, of all things, offered to expand their little party. And then for most of what had followed he'd been far too angry with Angel to feel glad that he was there, to appreciate that a whole new set of options that might not include his immediate flight had suddenly presented themselves in the back reaches of his mind, back where he tried to usher anything that might be considered pleasant.

      Now that he was away from it all, removed by even a few feet and a calm glass door, much less pleasant possibilities occurred. Maybe Angel was just there to finish things off, now that he had seen Krycek's hand and understood what he could have for his own. Maybe he was the kind of guy who always had to say goodbye, even when he ran away from someone. Maybe he just wanted to be sure Krycek wouldn't follow. Maybe he thought he could get one last fuck from Alex the freak before moving on to greener pastures or whatever was greener on the other side of the fence for a guy who didn't see much grass except in cemeteries anyway. And maybe he was right.

\----------------------------------------

WHEN KRYCEK STEPPED out of the shower into the small space afforded him between the toilet, sink and door, Angel was leaning against the outside frame, shoulder just barely crossing the threshold into the room. Krycek paused for the briefest of seconds as he reached for a towel mid-stride; when he'd made an obligatory pass at most of his flesh with the cloth he tucked it tightly around his waist and finally looked in the mirror.

      There was nothing in it, of course, except his own sorry mug speckled with want and need no matter how cautiously he thought he'd concealed that dangerous pair of emotions.

      He closed his eyes slowly and inhaled as deeply as he could manage while still trying to appear calm, then turned around. Angel had turned to face him, too.

      "Are you trying to make a point?" Angel asked, his tone bored and only mildly inquisitive. It was as if they'd picked up mid-conversation.

      "A point about what?" Krycek asked back, even less interested in an answer beyond rhetoric than Angel had seemed.

      "I don't know." But he did. They both did. Angel said it first, like it just had occurred to him, just a little stream-of-consciousness, let's-work-this-out-together conversation between friends: "Control."

      "So now I need a reason to want to go dancing and get laid?"

      "That's what this was about?"

      "Hey, you're the one who decided to stick around for the show," Krycek said. "Suddenly it's my fault you saw something you didn't like?"

      "Bullshit." Angel's lips were tight across his mouth and the word spit out like a guillotine. "You threw that boy in my face."

      "You didn't leave," Krycek retorted. "It's easier this way, right -- I'm the bad guy? All I wanted was to get out of this fucking room for a change --"

      "That's not what we have."

      "Well then what the hell is it?"

      "You know."

      "No, I don't," Krycek said. "I'm not some guy you picked up in a bar for a quick blow job. In case you hadn't noticed, you keep coming back."

      Krycek wondered if Angel could remember what his face looked like when it winced. "That doesn't mean anything," Angel said, low.

      "Right. It doesn't mean anything that you probably never sleep except when you've just fucked me, right?" Silence. "Am I right?" He didn't really need an answer to that one, anyway. "It's doesn't mean a damn thing that whether it's against your better judgment or not you're still here tonight, right, even after..." He didn't know what to call it. "After what almost happened?" That was more of a slap than a wince. But, Jesus, if they were actually going to talk to it, they should fucking talk about it. "Don't tell me what we have is like that -- that boy, whatever his name was. That's not what this is."

      "We're not going to go on some romantic walk on the beach, Alex."

      "Fine," Krycek said, roughly. "You know what?" He was shaking his head, almost waving his hands around trying to shake out the dichotomous bind of heavenly homemaking or hellish heartbreak. "Fine," he said again. "You think I didn't give up on that shit as something I would have in my life a long time ago?" He dropped the towel on the floor, slicked back his wet hair with a hand and walked back into the main room. Krycek could feel Angel's eyes on his ass as he opened the dresser and turned around. "Whatever your issues are, Angel, you obviously need *something* from me, and I'm sick of being left in the fucking dark as to what that is." He stepped closer, split the distance in a few paces and leaned in. "Haven't you heard? I'm very good at following orders." He was within arm's length now. "Tell me what you *want*, Angel."

\----------------------------------------

ANGEL WANTED TO fuck again, so they did. He wanted to be able to leave without a big scene, so Krycek let him. He still couldn't tell if Angel would come back, but it was better than the alternative. Whatever that was. It was getting hard to think of *any* end to this situation that wouldn't be destructive and disastrous, even when he was racking his brain. How he supposed to compete with hundreds of years of self-denial? Or, at least, years of hedonism followed by a good strong dose of moralistic doubt. So he let Angel go.

      He went back to work. What else was he supposed to do? He couldn't sit around in that big studio and think about how when he was 50, if he ever actually lived that long, Angel would look the same and probably *still* wouldn't want to let him in. So he decided he had resigned himself to it, until about the time that he was getting his face beaten into a bar counter by an ex-partner of that fucking racist cop who somehow had determined that Krycek was trying to set them both up.

      Then all he could think about was Angel, all over again, how he didn't want a concussion that meant they couldn't lie next to each other in bed that night. He didn't want to get his brain bashed in if the memory loss meant he'd forget the past few weeks. He didn't want to have his body dropped into the Pacific without getting to swim under a moonlit sky and fuck Angel in the sand until just before dawn.

      So he ran. He fucking ran harder than he ever had before in his life, staggered into the apartment building and sagged against the smooth metallic walls of the elevator. He wanted to crawl to his door but he was so close that he kept putting one foot in front of the other and he was there, the cool bronze of the knob in his hand. He got in, shut the door and slid to the floor.

      "Looks like they got whatever they were looking for," Angel said.

      Oh fuck. He couldn't think of anything to say except, "What are you doing here?" He was still hunched on the parquet entryway, holding what felt like a bruised or even broken rib.

      Angel's tone jumped from calm assessment to concern: "Alex, you're hurt," he said, moving to help Krycek stand up.

      "I'm fine." It was such a bad lie coming out of his mouth that Krycek almost laughed out loud.

      Angel ignored the falsehood and the subsequent protests. "Do you have any ice around here?"

      It's with the food, he wanted to say, but Angel was already moving toward the freezer, using the lone towel to wrap cubes from the tray that Krycek knew with all certainty he had never filled, let alone bought. "I didn't give them anything," he said while Angel's back was turned, answering the original greeting that he'd been so grateful, so terrified to hear.

      "I know." Angel crouched down near the door. He was being so tender with the ice pack on his cut-up cheeks, and they were even closer than he'd been to Mulder on that long-ago day in the D.C. apartment. He saw Angel's nose flare a little before he turned the dishrag over to see specks of blood barely visible in the dimmed apartment.

      Krycek wanted to pull away for a second, willed himself to be still. Cautiously, he cleared his throat. "Does this make you..." Angel looked up, met his eyes. "I'm bleeding," Krycek finished.

      Angel almost smiled. "I know," he said, all business.

      "Well, don't you want to..." Jesus, he couldn't even finish a sentence with this man. How were they supposed to start anything that would last longer?

      "No," Angel said, in what seemed like a calm voice. "I'm fine. You don't have to worry."

      "I'm not worried." He wasn't. But that could have been the head injury thinking. "I just wondered... This doesn't make you want to feed off me?"

      "No. I'm..." Angel was slow with explanation. "I'm in control of this," he said. "It's fine. You're hurt, I'm helping, end of story. It's when I'm distracted. By something. Someone. I get... caught up in things.

      Krycek looked him right in the eye. "I don't believe that. I don't believe you can't control it even then." Angel was still pressing the ice pack against Krycek's face, but was shaking his head gently. "I see how you are, Angel -- you are nothing if not controlled, always. Even when you think you're spinning like mad, you're in control."

      Angel put down the ice. "You don't know. You haven't seen."

      "What happened the other night?"

      "I got angry." He seemed to smirk at his own understatement.

      "Right," Krycek said. "But you didn't lose control, not really. You wanted to get angry, wanted to prove something to me about how horrible you could be. It takes horrors a lot worse than that to scare me off."

      Angel met his glance but still his shook his head. "You haven't seen me," he said. "Not like how I can get when things are bad. You don't know what it's like." Angel's voice was low and trembling and almost, Krycek thought, scared. He didn't seem to believe that Krycek was capable of believing he had anything to offer but violence.

      Krycek took Angel's hand, brought the knuckles up against his tender cheekbones. "Show me," he said, simply. Angel was very, very still, like a small animal. "You know you want to taste this," he continued, not taunting, not teasing, just matter-of-fact, calm and accepting. "Do it. Clean me up."

      For half a second -- probably one-billionth of the moments Angel had accumulated in his life making decisions -- Krycek thought Angel was going to do it. Then he just said, "No."

      Krycek pushed back and away from him, letting the weak momentum of his tired legs propel him across the smooth wood. "Fine," he said, somehow finding anger coming out his mouth though all he felt inside was loss. "You know what? Get the fuck out. Because I can't handle this. I just about got my brains bashed in tonight and nothing's really feeling real any more. Not even this. Especially not you. You're so in control, you're not feeling *anything*, are you? You're not even really here. You don't want to feel yourself want anything. That's not fucking. That's just going through the motions. And I've done enough of that tonight." And where he'd played with Angel before, threatened and moved away when he didn't really have to, he meant it this time and he knew it was clear in his voice.

      Angel was kneeling next to the door, and after a minute he crawled slowly over to where Krycek had come to rest. He was still graceful on his knees like that, proving that even centuries spent in human form didn't make him any less Darwinian than the next guy who became leonine and primal in a few short feet. This way, the two of them so close to the ground, it was like the rest of the room didn't even exist, like if they could stay under the radar of the doorknob they'd never have to face the world outside or above.

      When he reached Krycek, Angel lowered himself again, almost straddling where Krycek was sitting, a little stiff still because of his sore ribs. Angel cupped Krycek's purpling cheek in his palm, let his thumb rub through the smears of blood that still painted the flesh. He sat back a little, put the bloody thumb between his lips and licked.

      Krycek was conscious of trying very hard not to move a millimeter, but not much else penetrated his concentration, until he felt the growing warmth of Angel's dick pressing into his upper thigh. Then he moaned a little, without meaning to, the sound making his injured chest vibrate not entirely painfully, and Angel leaned in to kiss the cut with his mouth. He licked his lips, kissed it again, then moved to meet Krycek's own questing lips with a hard, fierce kiss.

      But then he was pulling away again in that controlled movement that made it seem his limbs were tightly-wound wires instead of bone. Krycek, who had been leaning into Angel as they were kissing, began to lose his balance, to fall back on one of his bruised wrists. So when his fist came forward and glanced off Angel's chin, he reasoned, it was more out of a lame attempt to regain his equilibrium than any kind of anger. Not that you would easily be able to tell the difference.

      Angel growled a little at the impact, and before he thought about it twice, Krycek hit him again. "Why can't you just think with your dick like a normal guy for a change?"

      Angel sat down hard, letting a few inches of space gather between their legs. "Because I'm not a normal guy," he said.

      Krycek so sick of this shit. "You're not that different," he said. "You're not different about that, anyway. I know you want to fuck me."

      "No." His voice was so full of hunger that it was difficult to believe him. "I think I don't," he said, as if it would be more true the second time.

      "Jesus, will you just stop thinking so much?" Krycek hit him again, even though he could tell he was probably breaking a finger if it hadn't been already, even though he knew it probably would have been smarter to just let the man leave. But it wasn't as if Angel was the only one who sometimes had to resort to violence to get a point across. Sometimes Krycek wanted nothing so much as to just slam his own hand into something warm, to feel the recoil and the rush of swinging his own body out of the return flight's way.

      But he was sitting down, so he didn't have far to go, and anyway he didn't really want to get out of Angel's way, or he never would have punched him in the first place. At the third contact, Angel roared --actually roared, out loud, this loud animal scream that to Krycek only slightly resembled the noise that some men make when they're shot in the stomach. But the roars emanating from Angel's lips weren't of pain. They were the sound of conquest.

      He fell on Krycek's neck, pinning his arms to the floor above his head and letting his full weight crush the broken ribs. Angel was moving a hip between Krycek's splayed legs, pushing his cock against Krycek's pelvis as he swallowed. Krycek was growing light-headed again, the blood loss and the previous concussion collaborating to paint his vision with hazy dots that grew larger and fuzzier until they were just big splotch of darkness and he was limp on the ground. And still Angel drank.

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KRYCEK'S FACE WAS warm. His eyes fluttered, instinctually recognized the glare of sunlight and quickly shut again. Then there was pain, almost everywhere. The back of his head. The front of his face. His wrists. His ribs. His neck. And the floor seemed to be moving beneath him until he passed out again.

      When he awoke the second time, the sun was gone, and he found that if he lay perfectly still, most of the pain would hover at a low grade of overwhelming. He could open his eyes for a few seconds at a time, a few more each time, until he could mostly squint without blinking. The first thing he saw was Angel, leaning against the foot of the bed, a few feet away. He had his knees drawn up and his head hung down between them.

      He had to close his eyes again. But when they were shut, he could only remember: The savage, inhuman look in Angel's glare as he'd pushed Krycek down. The look that was so far beyond lost, so lacking anything left to lose or care about that where Krycek had found the possibility of some friendly blood sucking acceptable -- arousing, to be fair -just hours before, then he had been downright terrified. This was not consensual if extreme sex play with a fellow adult, albeit of a different vintage. This was about being at something's mercy. About hoping it wasn't hungry enough to need a full meal. It had been so long since anyone had made him want to escape the coming death no matter what he'd have to beg, borrow or sell his soul away for. But Krycek didn't feel very alive for this successful maneuver.

      "You're still here," Krycek said, slowly letting his eyelids slide open.

      Angel's voice was flat. "I had a feeling you wouldn't want me taking you to a hospital, filling out insurance forms and all that."

      Krycek laid his palms flat on the floor, pushed his upper body up into a sitting position like his torso was just the resistance of a push-up. His ribcage burned, and he was a little dizzy, but it didn't seem that he would fall over. He waited until his breath was steady, then said, "So I must be okay."

      "Yeah," Angel said. When Krycek raised his eyebrows, asking silently for some further kind of reassurance, he said, "It's no more than you'd lose donating blood."

      Krycek let his chest sag a little; it was just too damn tiring to hold himself up so straight and angry. "Maybe you didn't hear," he said, flexing the muscles in his legs. "I gave at the office."

      Angel stood up. "I was just waiting to make sure..."

      "That I would wake up?"

      "You'll be fine."

      "Then what are you sticking around for? Dessert?" This was just all fucked up, all different. He wasn't pissed at Angel but wanting

underneath for them to curl up under the covers and sleep for the next decade. He wasn't playing hard to get. He wanted the guy to leave him the fuck alone, and for once Angel just wouldn't fucking go away.

      "I'm... I mean, I..." Angel couldn't finish the thought, the sentence, the apology, the whatever it was that dangled uncompleted from his lips, like he was hoping Krycek would grab the other end of it and they'd finish it together. Not bloody likely.

      "You know, it is possible to have a soul and not be a fucking coward," Krycek said.

      That loosened Angel's vocabulary. "You think this is the easy answer?" he asked, angrily. "Easy is thinking you can take what you want from someone without consequences." He was staring at Krycek, that deep soul-stare like somehow the two brains will simultaneously produce just one, perfect conclusion. One perfect solution. But there wasn't one, and they both knew it.

      Angel stood, slowly, hands almost raised to prove he meant no further harm. When he reached the door, he said, just under his breath, "That doesn't mean I'm not a coward."

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END. Please send all feedback to . Also available at the website (http://home.earthlink.net/~shanak11/fiction.html) is a short, behind-the-scenes essay, if that kind of thing interests you. Thanks for sticking around for the conclusion!  
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